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THE IDEA OF GOD 

IN THE LIGHT OF 

RECENT PHILOSOPHY 

W$t <§tfforb Hectare* 

DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN 
IN THE YEARS 1912 AND 1913 



BY 

A. SETH PRINGLE-PATTISON 

LL D , D.C.L 

FELLOW OK THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS 
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 



SECOND EDITION REVISED 



NEW YORK 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

AMERICAN BRANCH : 35 West 32nd Street 
LONDON, TORONTO. MELBOURNE, AND BOMBAY 

1920 



■ ^ 



Copyright, 1920 

by Oxford University Press 

american branch 



PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMERICA 

23 1320 
©CU601411 



I 



TO 

MY WIFE 

AND THE DEAR MEMORY OF 

RONALD 

OUR YOUNGEST SON 

WHO GAVE HIS LIFE WILLINGLY 

AT GINCHY ON THE SOMME 

6TH SEPTEMBER I916 



PREFACE 

Distractions and anxieties arising out of the war have 
interfered with the preparation of these Lectures for the 
press, but it is possible that, at certain points, the thought 
may have gained in maturity by the enforced delay. 

Readers of this volume who listened to the Gifford Lec- 
tures in 1912 and 1913 will recognize that, in the main, the 
material and the treatment are the same. But I have not 
hesitated, on occasion, to transfer a lecture or part of a lec- 
ture from its original place in the series, when the sequence 
of thought seemed to gain thereby in clearness and logical 
coherence. One or two passages also, which appeared to 
have little or no bearing on the argument as it ultimately 
took shape, have been removed. A lecture, introductory to 
the Second Series, criticizing two recent essays on Religion, 
has been omitted. It served at the time as a convenient 
illustration of the thesis of the previous year's course, and 
it was printed shortly thereafter as an article in the Hibbert 
Journal for October 19 13. But the discussion has not 
sufficient permanent importance to justify its retention here, 
and its inclusion would interrupt the course of what is 
intended to be a continuous argument. On the other hand, 
I have tried to develop the subject more fully at points 
where the original treatment had been somewhat hurried. 
This applies more particularly to the lecture on ' Time and 



vi PREFACE 

Eternity ' and to the criticism of M. Bergson's doctrine of 
Time and its implications in the lecture which follows. 
Here what was originally a single lecture has grown into 
two. Complete success in such a region is unattainable, but 
I trust that what is now offered is, in some respects, a more 
adequate handling of a peculiarly difficult subject. In Lec- 
ture IV, while my view of the relation of biology to physics 
remains unchanged, I have added some detailed criticism 
of recent neo-vitalist statements from which I wish to disso- 
ciate myself ; and the discussion of Pluralism in the later lec- 
tures has been extended by including a criticism of the views 
of Professor Howison, Dr. Rashdall, and Dr. McTaggart. 
The choice of a title has caused me some difficulty. The 
title eventually chosen may easily be condemned as too 
ambitious ; but it has at least the merit of comprehensiveness, 
and it is also the official subject of the Lectures founded by 
Lord Gifford. It has the disadvantage — if it be a disadvan- 
tage — that it does not indicate in advance the nature of the 
conclusion reached. But philosophical labels are for the 
most part misleading, and the conclusion will mean more 
to the reader if he discovers it for himself. I am especially 
anxious, however, that the reference to l recent philosophy ' 
should not lead anyone to suppose that the book is merely, 
or even primarily, an historical survey of opinion on the 
subject with which it deals. There are many names men- 
tioned in the course of the lectures, and many theories 
criticized, but there is no pretence of an exhaustive survey, 
and not one of the names and theories actually cited is 
introduced on historical grounds. They are all employed 
as a means of illuminating, either by affinity or by force of 
contrast, the constructive position which is gradually built up 
in the course of the lectures. In short, although it consists 
largely of criticism, the interest of the book is neither critical 



PREFACE vii 

nor historical, but constructive throughout. This method 
of construction through criticism is the one which I have 
instinctively followed in everything I have written. I do 
not claim that it is the best method; I simply desire that 
its nature be recognized. 

In the present case, when contemporary discussion on 
the fundamental questions of philosophy and religion is 
peculiarly active, the necessity is almost imposed upon a 
writer of defining his own position by reference to divergent 
views and other forms of statement. And I venture to 
think that the value of his work is thereby increased; for 
only by such mutual criticism, and the resulting definition 
of the points of difference, can we advance towards a com- 
mon understanding. Readers of this volume will note the 
prominence given to Professor Bosanquet's impressive state- 
ment of the Idealistic position in the two volumes of his 
Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh. I found 
it especially instructive, from time to time, to make Profes- 
sor Bosanquet's treatment my point of departure, because, 
along with the large amount of general agreement, there 
was at certain points a difference of emphasis, to say the 
least, in our ways of holding the Idealistic creed. The lec- 
ture on ' The Criterion of Value ' and the two lectures on 
' The Absolute and the Finite Individual ' may be mentioned 
as examples of what I mean. 

It is possible that some readers may think that I have 
drawn too frequently upon the poets. That is perhaps a 
question of temperament. But my procedure was, at any 
rate, quite deliberate, for I accept Wordsworth's description 
of poetry as ' the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ', 
and I am even ready to be persuaded by Mr. Yeats that 
* whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone 
permanent '. 



viii PREFACE 

In concluding this preface, I desire to thank the Senatus 
of the University of Aberdeen for the honour they did me 
in appointing me to the Lectureship. It has enabled me to 
bring together the reflections of many years, and I have 
striven, in return, to give them of my best. 

To my brother, Professor James Seth, who read the lec- 
tures in manuscript, and to Professor H. R. Mackintosh, of 
New College, Edinburgh, and Mr. H. F. Hallett, M.A., who 
read the whole in proof, my warm thanks are also due for 
their ready help and valuable suggestions. 

University of Edinburgh, 
December 20, 1916. 

The reception accorded to these Lectures encourages me 
to hope that the book may continue to be found of service 
for some time. The call for a new edition has come while 
publishers are still hampered by difficulties of production 
and by the accumulations of the war. In these circum- 
stances it has been decided to print the present edition from 
the plates of the American edition issued in 19 17. This has 
made it impossible to introduce into the text more than ver- 
bal corrections, but I have been able to add, by way of ap- 
pendix, a few supplementary notes referring to the more 
important criticisms and discussions to which the volume 
has given rise. Any attempt at mediation in a difficult dis- 
pute is necessarily exposed to attack from both sides, and 
this has happened to my attempt, in the second series of 
Lectures, to balance the claims of the Absolute and the 
individual or of monism and pluralism. But I have met 
with nothing to shake my confidence in the fundamental 
positions and lines of argument to which I had committed 
myself, 



CONTENTS 

FIRST SERIES 

LECTURE I 
HUME'S ' DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION ' 

PAGE 

Reasons for beginning with Hume I 

The importance attached to the ' Dialogues ' by Hume himself 2 
The question debated is not 'the Being but only the Nature of 

the Deity' 6 

Demea's attempt to base religious faith on philosophical 

scepticism 7 

The a priori argument dismissed 8 

Concentration of the discussion on the argument from design . 9 
The criticisms of Philo and his anticipation of modern points 

of view 11 

Hume's tenacious adherence to the ' speculative tenet of 

theism ' 14 

Contrast between the order of nature and the record of human 

history 16 

Hypothesis of a finite God suggested but set aside .... 19 

Surrender of the moral attributes . 20 

Insignificant character of the conclusion 21 

LECTURE II 
KANT AND THE IDEA OF INTRINSIC VALUE 

Hume's conclusion determined by the restricted nature of his 

premisses 24 

Kant's analysis of moral experience 26 

The idea of value or worth : the good will 27 

' A realm of ends ' : teleological view of the world of nature . 28 

The ' postulates ' of God and immortality 31 

Defects of Kant's statement 34 

The doctrine of the self-legislative will 36 

The idea of value in Kant's successors and throughout the 

nineteenth century . , . . . . , . 38 



x CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The philosophical antithesis between Idealism and Naturalism 40 

The objectivity of values 42 

The idealistic position not to be staked on any minor issue . . 43 



LECTURE III 

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DUEL BETWEEN 
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM 

The protest of 'the heart' against the reason 47 

The Kantian separation between Knowledge and Belief . . 48 

Lange's History of Materialism and the ' flight to the ideal' . 52 
Lotze's protest against materialistic dogmatism : ' the world 

of forms ' and ' the world of values ' 54 

Ritschl's repudiation of metaphysics 56 

Spencer's Unknowable as the reconciliation of religion and 

science . 58 

Mr. Balfour's argument : its sceptical and constructive aspects 60 
The disparagement of reason : danger of so presenting the 

principle of value 62 

LECTURE IV 

THE LIBERATING INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY 

The relations of philosophy and the sciences 66 

Biology and physics 68 

The claim of biology to use its own categories 71 

The organism as a self-maintaining whole ...... 73 

Criticism of Neo-vitalistic statements 77 

Re-interpretation of the doctrine of evolution 81 

Revival of general interest in philosophy ...... 86 

LECTURE V 

THE LOWER AND THE HIGHER NATURALISM 

Ambiguity of the term Naturalism 88 

A defence of order and continuity against an arbitrary Super- 
naturalism 89 

Illusory 'explanation' of the more developed by the less 

developed 9 1 

Transition in nature from one order of facts to another . . 93 

The question of the ' origin ' of life .,,.,,. 98 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

The passage from perception and association to the conceptual 

reason ioo 

Continuity of process does not exclude the emergence of real 

differences 103 

The meaning of potentiality 106 

Philosophy as criticism of categories 108 



LECTURE VI 

MAN AS ORGANIC TO THE WORLD 

Manufactured difficulties as to the subjectivity or relativity of 

knowledge no 

Cognition conceived "as the ' barren rehearsal ' of a finished 

reality 113 

Relatedness versus Relativity 115 

The epistemological problem in Locke, Berkeley, and Kant . .116 

The objectivity of the secondary qualities 120 

Professor Laurie's statement of philosophical Realism . . . 122 
The evolution of the sense-organs as part of nature's purpose of 

self-revelation 126 

The same principle applies to the aesthetic qualities .... 127 



LECTURE VII 

ETHICAL MAN: THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 

The ethical versus the cosmic process 132 

The Religion of Humanity, as a merely 'subjective synthesis', 

follows from this dualism 133 

Comte's phenomenalism depends on a false idea of metaphysics 135 
Vital truths of Comte's religious doctrine : (a) the central 
function assigned to religion in human history; (b) the 
insistence on the moral qualities as the only fit objects of 
love and worship; (c) the organic life of Humanity . . 137 

Humanity taken as a species of finite Absolute 145 

Impossibility of thus isolating Humanity illustrated from 

Comte himself 146 

His subordination of the intellect to 'the heart' makes him 

eventually false to the scientific spirit 150 



xii CONTENTS 

LECTURE VIII 

POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM 

PAGE 

The time-process as the progressive revelation of an eternal 

Reality 153 

The human and the divine : Positivism and Christianity . . 157 

Agnosticism depends on a false ideal of knowledge . . . 158 

Substance and qualities, essence and appearance .... 159 

Confusion between the unknowable and the unfathomable . . 165 
The Religion of Humanity and the worship of the Unknowable 

as complementary half-truths 170 

LECTURE IX 

IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM 

Further reflections on the Agnostic fallacy 172 

General conclusion reached in these lectures 175 

The idealistic doctrine maintained does not involve Monadism or 

Pan-psychism 178 

The motives underlying monadistic theories 179 

The desire to save spontaneity and freedom 183 

Illusory attempt to evolve the very conditions of evolution . . 185 

Such freedom becomes indistinguishable from pure contingency 186 
A realm of physical law required as the milieu of the spiritual 

life 188 



LECTURE X 

IDEALISM AND MENTALISM 

Our conclusion does not involve Subjective Idealism or Men- 

talism 190 

The circular nature of Berkeley's argument 191 

Ferrier's demonstration of an ' infinite and everlasting Mind ' 

proceeds on the same lines 193 

Green's Eternal Consciousness 195 

The mentalistic argument yields us at best only the empty form of 

the Ego .198 

To regard the material world as self-subsistent, or as a res 

completa, is a moral as much as a speculative impossibility . 200 
The larger idealistic truth admits of a frankly realistic attitude 

towards external nature 201 



CONTENTS xik 

SECOND SERIES 

LECTURE XI 

THE LOWER PANTHEISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF 
DEGREES OF TRUTH 

PAGE 

The argument of the First Series reviewed 207 

The reality of appearances 216 

But is not this merely the pell-mell of empirical occurrence over 

again? 219 

The idea of a system and a scale of values is essential . . . 220 

Spinoza on degrees of ' perfection ' 221 

Mr. Bradley's use of the principle 222 

Illustration from the world of Shakespeare's tragedies . . . 223 

LECTURE XII 

THE CRITERION OF VALUE: ITS NATURE 
AND JUSTIFICATION 

Mr. Bradley's criterion of inclusiveness and harmony . . 226 
Accepted by Professor Bosanquet in his formula of individuality 

and non-contradiction 227 

Formal and abstract character of such a principle .... 230 
We must argue from the specific modes of our finite consciousness 

of value 231 

Mr. Bradley's transformation of the purely logical criterion . 23s 

His unconvincing defence of this transformation .... 234 

The real defence is the view taken of man as an organ of reality 235 

The inevitable assumption involved 236 

The real meaning of the ontological argument 240 

LECTURE XIII 

THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL 

Ideals operative in experience are themselves part of experience 243 

Common neglect of this, e. g. in Hume's argument . . . 244 

Descartes's argument from the idea of a Perfect Being . . 246 
The cosmological argument also rises from the imperfect to the 

perfect 249 

The Ideal the most real thing in the world 251 

Solution of the problem of immanence and transcendence . 253 



xiy CONTENTS 

LECTURE XIV 
THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE INDIVIDUAL 

PAGE 

Professor Bosanquet's view of the ' formal distinctness ' of selves 

as due to ' impotence ' 256 

The mere individual as a self-contained unit is certainly a fiction 257 

Again, the true life of the finite self is a finding of itself in 

social and universal interests 262 

But this in no way supports the idea of a ' confluence ' or blend- 
ing of selves 264 

The individual as a unique expression or focalization of the 

universe 266 

Selves not ' elements ' of Reality, but ' members ' or incarnations 

of the Absolute 270 

The 'adjectival' theory of the finite . . . . . . . 272 



LECTURE XV 

THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE INDIVIDUAL (Continued) 

Mr. Bradley's view of the plurality of souls as 'appearance and 

error ' 276 

Resulting view of the destiny of the finite self 280 

But the individual is not simply a very complex group of 

universals 282 

The origin of such finite centres the only fact fitly describable as 

creation 285 

Real difference and a measure of independence involved . . 287 

The testimony of our greatest experiences 289 

Personality as a formed will 291 

A world of persons the appropriate End of the Absolute as a self- 
communicating Life 294 

Note on Professor Bosanquet's use of the social analogy . . 296 



LECTURE XVI 

THE IDEA OF CREATION 

Ordinary idea of creation as an event in the past .... 299 

A phenomenal regress cannot lead to a First Cause . . . 301 

Cause as applied to God must be understood as Ground or Reason 302 

The relation of the universe to God is organic, not accidental . 304 



CONTENTS xv 

PAGE 

Creation as an ' eternal ' act 305 

Creation ' out of nothing ' is the denial of an independently exist- 
ing matter 306 

Creation as manifestation in and to conscious spirits . . . 308 

No existence of God prior to and apart from such manifestation 310 

A comparison with Professor Howison's Pluralism . . . 315 

God must be more than primus inter pares 320 



LECTURE XVII 

TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE 

•Finite purpose implies desire for the non-existent and the adapta- 
tion of means to ends 323 

Do these features of the idea disqualify it as a principle of cosmic 

interpretation? 324 

The traditional argument from design 325 

Teleology as affected by the modern theory of organic develop- 
ment 327 

The idea of purpose becomes the idea of a systematic and intel- 
ligible whole 328 

The idea thus tends to pass into that of value or satisfaction . 332 

Illustrated by Spinoza's treatment of the subject .... SS3 

Can value be separated from activity or effort? 335 

The ' eternal purpose ' of God 340 



LECTURE XVIII 

TIME AND ETERNITY 

Three senses of the term ' eternal ' distinguishable .... 343 

The timelessness of truth : the Platonic world of Ideas . . . 345 

' Eternal ' in ordinary usage is rooted in our temporal experience 348 

The perception of succession implies a consciousness of duration 350 

Eternity as a to turn slmul 354 

The stages must be seen not merely simultaneously, but as elements 

in a completed purpose 358 

The analogy of an artistic whole 361 

The time-process must be retained, and yet transcended, in the 

Absolute 363 



xvi CONTENTS 

LECTURE XIX 
BERGSONIAN TIME AND A GROWING UNIVERSE 

PAGE 

The spatialized idea of time and the illusion of determinism . 367 
But the same illusion persists in M. Bergson's stress on the 

contingency of the future 370 

Past, present, and future organic to one another .... 376 

As a mere beginning, the elan vital is purely indeterminate . . 378 

M. Bergson's suggestion of a theistic background .... 379 
Progress predicable only of the parts, not of the Eternal Nature 

on which they draw 381 

Note on M. Bergson's doctrine of Time 383 

LECTURE XX 

PLURALISM— EVIL AND SUFFERING 

Dr. Rashdall's theory of a limited God ....... 388 

Dr. McTaggart's Absolute as a society of self-existent persons 391 

William James's Pluralistic Universe 393 

His mistaken conception of the Absolute as merely a spectator 

of the world-drama 397 

The problem of evil and suffering 400 

The arguments of Hume and Mill . . 401 

The conception of omnipotence 403 

The purely hedonistic ideal of both thinkers 406 

Failure of traditional theism to assimilate the most characteristic 

articles of Christian belief 409 

The eternal redemption of the world 412 

The element of casualty and ' the arduousness of reality ' . . 415 

The omnipotence of atoning love 417 



LECTURE I 

HUME'S ' DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL 
RELIGION ' 

It is just two hundred years since the birth of the greatest 
Scotsman who ever applied himself to these subjects. In 
Academies and learned journals, even in the daily and 
weekly newspapers, during the past year * we have been 
celebrating the bicentenary of David Hume, and recalling to 
mind the achievements which gave him so conspicuous a 
place in the history of thought. It has seemed to me there- 
fore not inappropriate to begin these lectures by some refer- 
ence to Hume's pronouncement on those ultimate questions 
which Lord Giflord had in view in the foundation of this 
lectureship. The more so as we are not left in this matter 
to deductions, more or less probable, from Hume's general 
theory of knowledge; he has dealt with the theistic problem 
explicitly and at length in his Dialogues concerning Natural 
Religion, a work to which his biography shows that he 
attached unusual importance as the deliberate and carefully 
weighed expression of his conclusions on the greatest of all 
themes. Although Hume's mode of stating the question, 
his handling of the argument, as well as the nature of his 
conclusions, are in many ways strikingly different from those 
which naturally suggest themselves to a thinker of to-day, 
I have thought that these very differences of formulation 
and of emphasis render a statement of his position valuable 
as a background to our further discussion. And although 
I do not intend these lectures to be primarily historical 
in character, a certain amount of historical orientation is 

1 The first course of lectures was delivered during the University ses- 
sion, 1911-12. 



2 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES' lect. 

indispensable, if only to enable us to understand how the 
question takes for us to-day the form it does. 

The history of Hume's Dialogues is indeed curious, and 
the fortunes of the work have been, perhaps, hardly com- 
mensurate with the care taken by its author to ensure its 
survival. It was written in the maturity of Hume's powers, 
when he was completing his revision of his youthful con- 
clusions in metaphysics and ethics and bidding a final 
farewell to philosophical speculation; and in his corre- 
spondence with Gilbert Elliot of Minto there is interesting 
evidence of the pains he bestowed on the balance of the 
argument. The terms in which he speaks of it are more 
appropriate to a personal document than to a purely literary 
performance. ' 'Tis not long ago ', he writes, ' I burned an 
old manuscript book, wrote before I was twenty, which con- 
tained page after page the gradual progress of my thoughts 
on that head. It began with an anxious search after argu- 
ments to confirm the common opinion; doubts stole in, 
dissipated, returned ; were again dissipated, returned again ; 
and it was a perpetual struggle of a restless imagination 
against inclination, perhaps against reason.' 

To Philo is assigned in the Dialogues the part of the 
sceptical objector — what Hume here describes as the strug- 
gle of a restless imagination — and because Philo's sceptical 
arguments are so entirely consonant with the general tenor 
of Hume's philosophy, it has been too common to take his 
utterances as representing by themselves Hume's own 
attitude to the question under discussion. But this is to 
ignore both the carefully constructed balance of the Dia- 
logues and their avowed and deliberate conclusion. Hume 
admits, in the letter already quoted, that the part of Philo 
is one which admirably suited his temperament. ■ 1 must 
confess, Philo,' says Cleanthes in the Dialogues, ' that of all 
men living, the task you have undertaken of raising doubts 
and objections suits you best.' And when Cleanthes further 



i THEIR SERIOUS PURPOSE 3 

rallies his ' ingenious friend ' on the ' too luxuriant fertility ' 
of his invention, which ' suppresses his natural good sense 
by a profusion of unnecessary scruples and objections ', and 
on the ' strange lengths ' to which his ' spirit of controversy, 
joined to his abhorrence of vulgar superstition ' has carried 
him in the course of the argument, we seem to hear the 
echoes of one of Gilbert Elliot's letters at the time of the 
composition of the work. Hume replied to his correspond- 
ent that he wished his friend lived near enough to sustain in 
actual discussion the role of Cleanthes, the philosophical 
theist. Cleanthes, he explicitly says, is the hero of the piece, 
and he is anxious to see his position strengthened, if that be 
possible, against his own sceptical doubts in the mouth of 
Philo. He admits ' the strong propensity of the mind ' to- 
wards the theistic conclusion, but he fears that ' unless that 
propensity were as strong and universal as that to believe in 
our senses and experience, it will be esteemed a suspicious 
foundation \ ' Tis here ', he proceeds, ' I wish for your 
assistance ; we must endeavour to prove that this propensity 
is somewhat different from our inclination to find our own 
figures in the clouds, our faces in the moon, our passions and 
sentiments even in inanimate matter.' There is good evi- 
dence, therefore, that Hume's purpose in the Dialogues was 
entirely serious, and the work as a whole is perhaps the most 
intimately personal expression of his views which we pos- 
sess. It appears to be the outcome of something like a per- 
sonal need to probe the question to the bottom, and to set 
down as carefully and dispassionately as possible both the 
positive and the negative results. 

This is the view which is naturally suggested by the his- 
tory of the manuscript and the deliberate publication of the 
volume as the philosopher's last bequest to the world he was 
leaving. For twenty-seven years Hume kept the manu- 
script by him. Rumours of the existence of such a work 
by ' the terrible David ' had got abroad. Its negative 



4 HUME'S 'DIALOGUES' lect. 

results were exaggerated by a natural enough inference, and 
its possible appearance was regarded by the upholders of 
religion with undisguised panic. When Hume sounded his 
friend Adam Smith, whom he had made his literary execu- 
tor, he found him unwilling to incur the odium of editing 
the book. Even his publisher, Strahan, to whom in conse- 
quence he transferred his manuscripts, declined the task. 
But with characteristic quiet determination the dying man 
had provided even for this contingency, ordaining in a last 
codicil to his will that, if still unpublished within two years 
and a half after his death, the sheets should be returned to 
his nephew David, ' whose duty in publishing them as the 
last request of his uncle must be approved by all the world \ 
By his nephew, therefore, the Dialogues were eventually 
published in 1779. The reception of the book was a some- 
what ironic commentary upon the alarm of the orthodox 
and the elaborate precautions of the author. ' The zealots,' 
as Hume calls them, seem to have found the volume less 
formidable in reality than in apprehension. Perhaps the 
delicate rapier-play of the discussion, though touching to the 
quick the vital points of the great issue, was at too Olympian 
a distance from the bludgeon-work of contemporary theo- 
logical controversy to cause them serious concern. A German 
translation, however, came into Kant's hands just as he was 
beginning the final draft of the Critique of Pure Reason, and 
his repeated references to Hume's arguments, in the Pro- 
legomena two years later, show how carefully he had studied 
it. But from that time till this the Dialogues have hardly 
received either from friend or foe the prominence they 
deserve, both as the sincerest expression of Hume's personal 
position and as a searching analysis of the theistic problem — 
an analysis which, in spite of its eighteenth-century man- 
nerisms and turns of phraseology, significantly anticipates at 
certain points the lines on which subsequent controversy 
has moved. 



i THE CHARACTERS AND THE ARGUMENT 5 

It is not my purpose here to follow all the windings of 
Hume's discussion, or even to appraise the value of the 
arguments used on either side of the debate. Some of the 
more significant of these we may have to return to later, for 
Hume's statement of a position is often classical. My pres- 
ent purpose is rather to bring out the main lines on which 
the discussion moves, the decisive considerations on which 
it turns, and, as far as possible, the precise nature of the 
conclusion arrived at. The very differences between Hume's 
method of stating the question and those which seem natural 
and appropriate to us, will prove, I think, instructive for 
our further discussion; and the strangely unsatisfying char- 
acter of his conclusion, even in its most positive aspect, must 
at least help us to realize what we mean by the existence of 
God — what the idea of God stands for in our conception of 
the universe and in our attitude towards life. 

The characters in the Dialogues are three in number, 
Cleanthes and Philo, already mentioned, and Demea, 
described in the Introduction as the representative of ' rigid 
inflexible orthodoxy '. Demea is introduced more as a foil 
to the other two than as making any serious contribution to 
the determination of the question. His treatment by his 
fellow-disputants is more or less ironic throughout, and he is 
represented as retiring in ill-concealed displeasure when his 
two opponents reveal the extent of the ground they hold in 
common, and before the remarkable attempt made in the 
concluding section to reach a frank adjustment of their 
differences. Demea's diatribes against ' mere human rea- 
son ' and ' the infirmities of human understanding ', which 
make the nature of God ' altogether incomprehensible and 
unknown to us ', are skilfully exploited by Philo at the outset 
of the discussion in a sceptical or agnostic interest, and it is 
certain that the literary play of the dialogue would suffer by 
Demea's absence. But the philosophical interest of the work 
lies in the encounter of Philo and Cleanthes, in the gradual 



6 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

development and ' progressive restatement ' of the argument 
between them according to the admissions of each disputant 
to his opponent. 

The modern reader who has Hume's popular reputation 
in mind, and who remembers also the absolute scepticism 
which is the outcome of Hume's philosophy as a whole, will 
probably be surprised to find that ' the being of a God ' is 
not disputed by any of the combatants. On the contrary, 
it is their common assumption. Philo no less than Demea 
emphasizes the position that * surely where reasonable men 
treat these subjects, the question can never be concerning 
the Being } but only the Nature of the Deity \ He accepts 
the former as a ' fundamental truth ', as ' unquestionable and 
self-evident ', and recalls with approbation Bacon's scriptural 
classification of the atheist with the fool. But the reader's 
natural surprise at the unchallenged admission of so seem- 
ingly important a position is soon lessened by finding how 
little the admission really amounts to — to no more, indeed, 
than a barely formal acknowledgement. ' Nothing exists 
without a cause/ says Philo, by way of interpreting this 
fundamental article of agreement, ' and the original cause 
of this universe (whatever it be) we call God, and piously 
ascribe to him every species of perfection/ So formulated, 
the being of a God involves no more than Locke's jejune 
proposition ' Something must be from eternity V and it is 
evident that everything depends on what we are warranted 
in concluding as to the nature of the so-called divine Being. 
This is the avowed subject of the Dialogues. 

The debate is started by Demea, whose disparagement of 
human reason, in comparison with the claims of authority 
and revelation, gives Philo an opening for developing the 
thesis in a purely sceptical direction by arguments familiar 
to every reader of the Treatise or the Enquiry. ' It is a 

1 Or the ' Being is ' of Parmenides and Spinoza. Cf. McTaggart, 
Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 187. 



i SCEPTICISM AS A BASIS OF FAITH 7 

pleasure to me ', says Philo, ' that just reasoning and sound 
piety here concur in the same conclusion, and both of them 
establish the adorably mysterious and incomprehensible na- 
ture of the Supreme Being.' This attempt * to erect religious 
faith on philosophical scepticism ' (so CleantheS accurately 
describes it) irresistibly recalls the similar movement in 
English philosophy a century later, connected with the 
names of Hamilton and Mansel, which found its natural 
sequel in the more complete Agnosticism of Herbert 
Spencer. Demea, like Sir William Hamilton, offers to ' cite 
all the divines almost, from the foundation of Christianity ' 
in support of his conclusion that, ' from the infirmities of hu- 
man understanding,' the nature of God is ' altogether incom- 
prehensible and unknown to us '. And, like Mansel, he adds, 
that though we ' piously ascribe to him every species of 
perfection ', ' we ought never to imagine that we comprehend 
the attributes of this divine Being, or to suppose that his 
perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfection of 
a human creature. Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge : 
these we justly ascribe to him because these words are 
honourable among men, and we have no other language or 
other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of 
him. But let us beware lest we think that our ideas anywise 
correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any 
resemblance to those qualities among men.' The reply of 
Cleanthes to this insidious method of argument must be 
accepted by any serious disputant as conclusive : * The 
Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attri- 
butes of which we can have no comprehension; but if our 
ideas, so far as they go, be not just and adequate, and corre- 
spondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this 
subject worth insisting on. Is the name without any mean- 
ing of such mighty importance? Or how do you Mystics, 
who maintain the absolute incomprehensibility of the Deity, 
differ from Sceptics or Atheists, who assert that the first 



8 HUME'S 'DIALOGUES' lect. 

cause of all is unknown and unintelligible? ' It is not, how- 
ever, till late in the discussion that Demea suddenly discov- 
ers that Philo, his assiduous ally, is ' secretly a more dan- 
gerous enemy than Cleanthes himself ', and soon afterwards 
takes occasion to leave the company. 

Before his departure he had made a second attempt to 
bring the discussion back to ' that simple and sublime argu- 
ment a priori, which, by offering to us infallible demon- 
stration, cuts off at once all doubt and difficulty '. By this 
Demea means the traditional ontological argument ' to 
a necessarily existent Being who carries the reason of his 
existence in himself, and who cannot be supposed not to exist 
without an express contradiction '. But however they may 
differ otherwise, Philo and Cleanthes are at one in per- 
emptorily rejecting this mode of argument as illegitimate. 
Hume has elsewhere anticipated Kant's famous criticism of 
the argument, by pointing out that existence is not an addi- 
tion to the content of any idea. And the argument, at least 
in its traditional form, has not survived their joint attack. 
Here Hume is content to rest his case on the distinction, so 
fundamental in the Enquiry, between ' matters of fact ' and 
' relations of ideas '. ' Nothing that is distinctly conceivable 
implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, 
we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, 
therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. . . . 
The words, therefore, necessary existence, have no meaning.' 
Moreover, if they had any meaning, ' why may not the 
material universe be the necessarily existent Being?' 

Hume's rejection of the conception of abstract or absolute 
necessity has been sustained by subsequent thought. Neces- 
sity is essentially relative, and expressible in the form of the 
hypothetical judgement — If A, then B. One fact may imply 
another, so that (on the basis of experience at least) we may 
reason in this logical form from the existence or nature of 
one set of facts to the existence or nature of another set of 



i THE ARGUMENT A PRIORI 9 

facts. But that the totality of facts which we call the uni- 
verse should exist at all — or as Demea puts it, that some- 
thing should exist rather than nothing — that is simply an 
ultimate fact to be accepted as such. There may be reason- 
ing within this Fact as to the concatenation and mutual 
dependence of its parts, but with the existence of the Fact 
itself reasoning has nothing to do. If any one prefers to 
use the term universe for the sum of created or dependent 
beings, he may, of course, refund the universe into God as 
its creative source; but the position of affairs is in nowise 
altered, save as regards the name of the ultimate Fact. God 
does not reason Himself into existence ; He simply is. Mod- 
ern logic recognizes the ultimate categorical judgement which 
underlies all hypothetical judgements or logical necessities; 
and any attempts that have been made to rehabilitate the 
ontological mode of proof have really transformed it beyond 
recognition, and must be dealt with on their own merits. 1 

The vital discussion in the Dialogues turns from beginning 
to end round the argument from design or final causes. It 
is introduced in Part II by Cleanthes with a certain impa- 
tience as the only argument worthy of serious consideration. 
1 Not to lose any time in circumlocutions, said Cleanthes, 
I shall briefly explain how I conceive this matter. Look 
round the world : contemplate the whole and every part of 
it : you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, 
subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which 

1 If we speak, as we may intelligibly do in another connexion, of God 
as necessarily existing, we mean, by the phrase, that the character of the 
world, as known to us, is such that it can only have its source in a Being 
defined as we ordinarily define God. God, in other words, is a necessary 
hypothesis to explain the nature of our experience. This is a logical 
inference of the ordinary type, and it may or may not be legitimate; but 
the necessity which we claim refers entirely to the relation of the con- 
clusion to its premisses within our knowledge, and has nothing to do 
with the extraordinary attempt of the ontological argument to deduce 
existence from essence, as if God's nature could be made, in some mys- 
terious fashion, the foundation or prius of his existence. ' I am ' and 
' I am that I am ' — the universe exists and its nature is what it is. 



io HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human 
senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various 
machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to 
each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration 
all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious 
adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles 
exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human 
contrivance; of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intel- 
ligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we 
are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes 
also resemble ; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat 
similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much 
larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work 
which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and 
by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of 
a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence/ 
In reply to this confident and somewhat dogmatic state- 
ment, Philo, in Hume's own speculative vein, develops 
a number of objections calculated to weaken the force of 
the analogy, thereby reducing the conclusion to ' a guess, 
a conjecture, a presumption ', or even to impugn the validity 
of the reasoning altogether. Some of these are repeated in 
his other works, and are of classical importance in the his- 
tory of theistic controversy. But in Part III Cleanthes, 
again with a touch of impatience, brushes aside the objec- 
tions as due to an affectation of scepticism on Philo's part 
rather than to any real difficulty in the subject-matter. It is 
not necessary, for example, to prove the similarity of the 
works of Nature to those of Art, * because this similarity is 
self-evident and undeniable '. ' Consider, anatomize the eye ; 
survey its structure and contrivance ; and tell me, from your 
own feeling, if the idea of a contriver does not immediately 
flow in upon you with a force like that of sensation.' There 
is, to his mind, something at once forced and frivolous in the 
objections by which it is sought to controvert or invalidate 



i THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN n 

this obvious conclusion. Philo's ' sifting, inquisitive dis- 
position ' suffers, he suggests, 'from too luxuriant a fertility 
which suppresses [his] natural good sense by a profusion of 
unnecessary scruples and objections \ At this point we are 
told ' Philo was a little embarrassed and confounded ', as if 
this shaft of Cleanthes had gone home; and for the interpre- 
tation of the Dialogues this little dramatic touch is of some 
significance. The statement of Cleanthes is, to a consider- 
able extent, Hume's own criticism, as ' a practical man of 
common sense V of the speculative difficulties which he 
makes it his business to raise. As he is reported to have said 
on a memorable occasion : ' Though I throw out my specula- 
tions to entertain the learned and metaphysical world, yet in 
other things I do not think so differently from the rest of the 
world as you imagine.' We find, as a matter of fact, in the 
concluding section of the Dialogues when, after the depar- 
ture of Demea, Philo talks with Cleanthes as one man with 
another, that he states his frank acceptance of the argument 
from design in terms as strong and unqualified as those of 
Cleanthes himself. But for the present * while he hesitated 
in delivering an answer, luckily for him, Demea broke in 
upon the discourse, and saved his countenance '. 

This diversion leaves Philo free to develop his sceptical 
and naturalistic vein in Parts IV to VIII, some of the most 
characteristic sections of the work. He elaborates the diffi- 
culty of stopping in the causal regress. ' A mental world, 
or universe of ideas, requires a cause as much as does a 
material world or universe of objects.' If we say that the 
different ideas which compose the reason of the Supreme 
Being fall into order, of themselves and by their own nature, 
' why is it not as good sense to say that the parts of the 
material world fall into order, of themselves and by their 
own nature ? ' 2 It may be permissible in science ' to explain 

1 He claims this title for himself in the concluding section. 

2 Part IV. 



12 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

particular effects by more general causes ', but it cannot be 
satisfactory ' to explain a particular effect by a particular 
cause, which was no more to be accounted for than the effect 
itself 7 

He returns to elaborate the contention that Thought is 
only one of a number of ' powers or energies in nature, 
whose effects are known, but whose essence is incompre- 
hensible '. ' In this little corner of the world alone, there are 
four principles, Reason, Instinct, Generation, Vegetation/ 
The world resembles a living creature, an animal or a veg- 
etable, perhaps more than it resembles a machine, ' and if Cle- 
anthes demands the Cause of our great vegetative or genera- 
tive faculty, we are equally entitled to ask him the Cause of 
his great reasoning principle.' For, after all, ' reason, in its 
internal fabric and structure, is really as little known to us 
as instinct or vegetation '. 2 

In a striking paragraph Hume anticipates the evolu- 
tionary view of the gradual perfecting of organic adjust- 
ments through the progressive modification of more primi- 
tive forms. ' If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must 
we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter, who framed so 
complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what 
surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, 
who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a 
long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, cor- 
rections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually 
improving? Many worlds might have been botched and 
bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck 
out : much labour lost : many fruitless trials made : and 
a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite 
ages in the art of world-making.' 3 Applied to the human 
eye, as developed from the pigment spots of lower creatures, 
this is the argument urged by Huxley and others against 
Paley and his Almighty Watchmaker. And in another 
1 Concluding words of Part IV. 2 Part VII. 3 Part IV. 



I NATURALISTIC CRITICISMS 13 

section, in which he elaborates a modern version of ' the old 
Epicurean hypothesis ' of the origin of the world ' from the 
eternal revolutions of unguided matter ', Hume turns the 
tables upon the ordinary teleological theory by a statement 
of the modern view of adaptation and the consequent sur- 
vival of the fittest. ' It is in vain to insist upon the uses of 
the parts in animals or vegetables and their curious adjust- 
ment to each other. I would fain know how an animal 
could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted ? Do we not 
find, that it immediately perishes whenever this adjustment 
ceases, and that its matter corrupting tries some new form.' l 
Hence even the old Epicurean hypothesis, he adds, ' though 
commonly, and I believe, justly, esteemed the most absurd 
system that has yet been proposed ', may be made with a few 
alterations to bear a faint appearance of probability. 

For himself, Philo is made to say that he is attracted by 
the ancient theory of a world-soul, and were he obliged to 
defend any speculation, he esteems ' none more plausible 
than that which ascribes an eternal inherent principle of 
order to the world \ 2 But the truth is ' we have no data 
to establish any system of cosmogony. Our experience, so 
imperfect in itself, and so limited both in extent and dura- 
tion, can afford us no probable conjecture concerning the 
whole of things.' This, says Philo, is the topic on which I 
have all along insisted. ' Each disputant triumphs in his 
turn,' ' but all of them on the whole prepare a complete tri- 
umph for the Sceptic' ' A total suspension of judgement is 
here our only reasonable resource.' 

Amid all this fire of criticism and brilliant improvisation 
of vivid hypotheses, Cleanthes remains by his original thesis 
quite unmoved. He compliments Philo on the fertility of 
his invention — ' So great is your fertility of invention, that 

*Part VIII (p. 428). 

2 Close of Part VI. And it may be noted that he repeats this as the 
most plausible view at the close of Part VIII, where this part of the 
argument reaches its conclusion. 



/ 

H HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

I am not ashamed to acknowledge myself unable, on a 
sudden, to solve regularly such out-of-the-way difficulties 
as you incessantly start upon me : though I clearly see, 
in general, their fallacy and error.' Looking at the subject 
practically, in short, as a matter for reasonable belief or 
disbelief, he invokes Philo's own serious and considered 
judgement against the ' whimsies ' he has delivered, whim- 
sies which he must be sensible * may puzzle but cannot con- 
vince us V And this appeal is not in vain, for even before 
the final rapprochement, we find, in the significant chapter 
which follows, on the moral attributes of the Deity, that 
Philo makes this unreserved admission : ' Formerly when we 
argued concerning the natural attributes of intelligence and 
design, I needed all my sceptical and metaphysical subtilty 
to elude your grasp. In many views of the universe, and 
of its parts, particularly the latter, the beauty and fitness of 
final causes strike us with such irresistible force, that all 
objections appear (what I believe they really are) mere 
cavils and sophisms.' And this is more than confirmed in 
the frank give-and-take of the two disputants in the conclud- 
ing section, where Hume seems to lay aside his sceptical 
mask and let us see for a few moments his individual belief 
on the great question in debate. ' Your spirit of contro- 
versy,' says Cleanthes in the opening of that section, ' joined 
to your abhorrence of vulgar superstition, carries you 
strange lengths, when engaged in an argument.' ' I must 
confess, replied Philo, that I am less cautious on the subject 
of Natural Religion than on any other; both because I know 
that I can never, on that head, corrupt the principles of any 
man of common-sense, and because no one, I am confident, 
in whose eyes I appear a man of common-sense, will ever 
mistake my intentions. You, in particular, Cleanthes, with 
whom I live in unreserved intimacy; you are sensible, that, 
notwithstanding the freedom of my conversation, and my 
1 Close of Part VII. 



i THE THEISTIC CONCLUSION 15 

love of singular arguments, no one has a deeper sense of 
religion impressed on his mind, or pays more profound 
adoration to the Divine Being, as he discovers himself to 
reason, in the inexplicable contrivance and artifice of Nature. 
A purpose, an intention, a design strikes everywhere the 
most careless, the most stupid thinker; and no man can be 
so hardened in absurd systems, as at all times to reject it. 
. . . All the sciences almost lead us insensibly to acknowl- 
edge a first intelligent Author; and their authority is often so 
much the greater, as they do not directly profess that inten- 
tion.' The suspension of judgement which he formerly 
advocated he now pronounces impossible. ' The existence 
of a Deity is plainly ascertained by reason.' 

Inconsistent as it may appear with the general tenor of 
Hume's philosophy, there is no doubt that this conclusion is 
neither due to the literary art of the dialogue nor is it an 
insincere concession to public opinion. It is to be found in 
all his works in which the question is touched, and every- 
where it is presented as the one sufficient foundation for 
rational religion as opposed to the ' superstition ' which his 
soul loathed. Thus in a note appended to the Treatise he 
says : ' The order of the universe proves an omnipotent mind. 
Nothing more is requisite to give a foundation to all the 
articles of religion.' x Similarly not long after, in a letter of 
1744, he defines rational religion as ' the practice of morality 
and the assent of the understanding to the proposition that 
God exists '. 2 In the Enquiry, in the important section ' Of 
a Particular Providence and of a Future State ' he says (in 
the transparent disguise of an Epicurean philosopher) that 
'the chief or sole argument for a divine existence (which 
I never questioned) is derived from the order of nature \ 
And again, the ' Natural History of Religion ' opens with a 
distinction between two questions in regard to religion — its 

1 Book I, Part III, section 14, Green and Grose's edition, p. 456. 

2 Hill Burton's Life of Hume, vol. i, p. 162. 



16 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

foundation in reason and its origin in human nature. * Hap- 
pily ', says Hume, ' the first question, which is the most 
important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest 
solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent 
Author, and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, 
suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary 
principles of genuine Theism and Religion/ This is pos- 
sibly more strongly phrased than Hume might at all times 
be willing to approve of ; but the consensus of passages from 
his various writings puts beyond reasonable doubt his sincere 
adherence to what he calls ' genuine Theism ' * and his 
acceptance of the argument from design as its rational basis. 
Professor Huxley speaks of Hume's ' shadowy and incon- 
sistent Theism '. Further examination will diminish our 
surprise at Hume's apparent inconsistency, while it dimin- 
ishes at the same time our sense of the value of this ' specu- 
lative tenet of Theism ', 2 to which he apparently assigns so 
important a position as the foundation of rational piety. It 
will be observed that the argument in the Dialogues has been 
uniformly and exclusively based on the evidences of order 
and design in external nature, and the conclusion reached 
was concerned, in Hume's phrase, solely with ' the natural 
attributes of intelligence and design \ Similarly in the 
' Natural History of Religion ' he distinguishes sharply 
between contemplation of ' the works of nature ' 3 > — which 
irresistibly suggests ' one single being who bestowed exist- 
ence and order on this vast machine and adjusted all its parts 
according to one regular plan or connected system ' — and 
consideration of ' the conduct of events, or what we may call 
the plan of a particular providence ', where the impression 
produced is strangely different. Two sections of the Dia- 
logues (Parts X and XI) are accordingly devoted to an 
examination of the phenomena of human life and history as 

1 Dialogues, Part XII. 2 Ibid. 

8 Essays, vol. ii, p. 314 (Green and Grose). 



I THE MISERY OF MAN 17 

bearing especially on ' the moral attributes of the Deity, his 
justice, benevolence, mercy and rectitude '. ' Here \ says 
Philo, ' I find myself at ease in my argument.' 

The discussion at this point takes its rise in a characteristic 
attempt of Demea to found the truth of religion on man's 
' consciousness of his own imbecility and misery '. In 
Part X, he and Philo vie with one another in the darkness 
of the colours in which they paint the misery of human and 
all animal life. ' A perpetual war is kindled amongst all 
living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the 
strong and courageous. Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the 
weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish 
to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent. Weak- 
ness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life : and 
'tis at last finished in agony and horror.' And even when 
man by combination in societies is able to surmount all his 
real troubles, he immediately raises up for himself imaginary 
enemies, the demons of his fancy, who haunt him with super- 
stitious terrors and blast every enjoyment of life. Society 
itself becomes the source of the most poignant miseries. 
* Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, 
contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, 
treachery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each 
other.' Whether we look at the long catalogue of physical 
diseases, at the mental torments of the passions and emo- 
tions, or at the labour and poverty which are the lot of the 
vast majority of mankind, we are driven to ask how a world 
like this can be traced to a Being in whom infinite power 
and wisdom are united with perfect goodness. ' In what 
respect ', says Philo, ' do his benevolence and mercy resemble 
the benevolence and mercy of men? . . . None but we 
Mystics, as you were pleased to call us, can account for 
this strange mixture of phenomena, by deriving it from 
attributes, infinitely perfect, but incomprehensible.' When 
Cleanthes unmasks the covert atheism of such an argument, 



18 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

and asks : ' To what purpose establish the natural attributes 
of the Deity, while the moral are still doubtful and uncer- 
tain ? ' Demea thinks to save the situation in the usual 
orthodox fashion. ' This world is but a point in comparison 
of the universe: this life but a moment in comparison of 
eternity. The present evil phenomena, therefore, are 
rectified in other regions and in some future period of 
existence. And the eyes of men, being then opened to 
larger views of things, see the whole connexion of general 
laws; and trace, with adoration, the benevolence and 
rectitude of the Deity, through all the mazes and intricacies 
of his providence.' 'No!' replies Cleanthes, with a vehe- 
ment disclaimer of this crooked logic, ' these arbitrary sup- 
positions can never be admitted contrary to matter of fact, 
visible and uncontroverted. Whence can any cause be 
known but from its known effects? Whence can any hy- 
pothesis be proved but from the apparent phenomena ? To 
establish one hypothesis upon another, is building entirely in 
the air/ He is prepared, however, to deny Demea's exag- 
gerated pessimism as contrary to experience. ' Health is 
more common than sickness, Pleasure than pain, Happiness 
than misery. And for one vexation which we meet with, 
we attain, upon computation, a hundred enjoyments.' But 
Philo reminds him (what he should have himself remem- 
bered in his pessimistic disquisitions) that it is impossible, in 
strictness, to estimate and compare all the pains and all the 
pleasures in the lives of all mankind, or of all living creatures, 
and to weigh the one against the other. Such a valuation of 
life must be matter of individual opinion, resting largely on 
temperament. But it is not necessary for the purposes of 
the argument, Philo proceeds, to decide such a question one 
way or another. ' Why is there any misery at all in the 
world? ... Is it from the intention of the Deity? But 
he is perfectly benevolent. Is it contrary to his intention? 
But he is almighty. Nothing can shake the solidity of this 



i A FINITE GOD 19 

reasoning, so short, so clear, so decisive; except we assert 
that these subjects exceed all human capacity, and that our 
common measures of truth and falsehood are not applicable 
to them.' 

Urged in this way, Cleanthes for the first time abandons 
his immovable attitude. Up to this point he has simply 
reiterated, in the face of every criticism and objection, the 
cardinal doctrine of natural religion. Now, under the 
pressure of the argument, he confesses that he has ' been 
apt to suspect the frequent repetition of the word infinite, 
which we meet with in all theological writers, to savour more 
of panegyric than of philosophy, and that any purposes of 
reasoning, and even of religion, would be better served, were 
we to rest contented with more accurate and more moderate 
expressions '. 'If we abandon all human analogy ' — as 
Demea and Philo seem inclined to do — he is afraid that ' we 
abandon all religion, and retain no conception of the great 
object of our adoration. If we preserve human analogy, we 
must for ever find it impossible to reconcile any mixture of 
evil in the universe with infinite attributes.' ' But supposing 
the Author of Nature to be finitely perfect, though far ex- 
ceeding mankind ; a satisfactory account may then be given 
of natural and moral evil, and every untoward phenomenon 
be explained and adjusted. A less evil may then be chosen, 
in order to avoid a greater ; inconveniences be submitted to, 
in order to reach a desirable end : and in a word, benevo- 
lence, regulated by wisdom, and limited by necessity, may 
produce just such a world as the present.' He invites Philo 
to give his opinion of this new theory. The theory is 
familiar to us in more recent times in J. S. Mill's post- 
humous essays, and may almost be said to be fashionable 
in contemporary thought as represented, for example, by 
William James, Dr. McTaggart, and others. It will there- 
fore meet us again. At present we must limit ourselves to 
noting Hume's attitude towards it 



20 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

Philo begins by repeating in a memorable passage the 
protest of Cleanthes against the illegitimate employment of 
human ignorance as a premiss in the argument of orthodox 
apologetics. If we are antecedently convinced, on independ- 
ent grounds, of the existence of an almighty Intelligence of 
perfect wisdom and goodness, the narrow limits of our 
understanding may reasonably suggest that the puzzling 
phenomena which seem so hard to reconcile with such 
a hypothesis may have many solutions at present, and per- 
haps for ever, beyond our grasp. ' But supposing, which is 
the real case with regard to man, that this creature is not 
antecedently convinced of a supreme intelligence, benevo- 
lent, and powerful, but is left to gather such a belief from the 
appearances of things; this entirely alters the case, nor will 
he ever find any reason for such a conclusion. He may be 
fully convinced of the narrow limits of his understanding; 
but this will not help him in forming an inference concerning 
the goodness of superior powers, since he must form that 
inference from what he knows, not from what he is ignorant 
of/ Our ignorance, in short, ' may be sufficient to save the 
conclusion concerning the divine attributes, yet surely it can 
never be sufficient to establish that conclusion \ Reviewing 
the facts in a more measured and judicial temper than he had 
exhibited in backing Demea's impeachment of Nature in the 
preceding section, Philo's deliberate conclusion is that ' the 
original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these 
principles, and has no more regard to good above ill [i.e. to 
happiness and misery] than to heat above cold, or to drought 
above moisture, or to light above heavy ' ; and what applies 
to natural evil ' will apply to moral, with little or no varia- 
tion \ The hypothesis of a perfectly benevolent deity, of 
great but limited power, seems to him negatived by ' the 
uniformity and steadiness of general laws ', which point to 
the unity of the Power in which they have their source. 

Philo must undoubtedly be taken here as the repre- 



i SURRENDER OF THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 21 

sentative of Hume himself. Cleanthes has appealed to 
him for his judgement on the case, and in the subsequent 
conversation with Philo he makes no return to the subject 
by way of controverting or even modifying the sweeping 
and, to most men, staggering conclusion arrived at. 1 In 
that conversation Philo still takes the leading part, and 
it is remarkable, as we have already partly seen, for the 
extent of the agreement which it establishes between the two 
chief disputants, defining, as it does, the extent to which 
Philo, the airy sceptic, admits the contention of the more 
solid Cleanthes — as a matter, if not of demonstrable cer- 
tainty, at any rate of reasonable belief. But the impor- 
tance of this agreement has already been largely discounted 
by the elimination of the moral attributes of God and of 
the whole idea of a moral government, or moral order, of 
the universe. As Cleanthes expresses it, ' to what purpose 
establish the natural attributes of the Deity while the 
moral are still doubtful and uncertain?' The significance 
of the conclusion is still further whittled away in the con- 
cluding pages, where Philo represents the whole controversy 
between theism and atheism as mainly verbal. The theist, 
while calling the supreme cause Mind or Thought, is ready 
to allow that the original Intelligence is very different from 
human reason, and the atheist ('who is only nominally 
so and can never possibly be in earnest') allows that the 
original principle of order bears some remote analogy to it. 

1 It must be noted, however, that in the concluding section he still 
refers to ' genuine Theism ' as teaching that man is ' the workmanship of 
a Being perfectly good, wise and powerful ; who created us for happi- 
ness, and who, having implanted in us immeasurable desires of good, will 
prolong our existence to all eternity, and will transfer us into an infinite 
variety of scenes, in order to satisfy those desires, and render our felic- 
ity complete and durable \ The phraseology of this curious passage strik- 
ingly recalls Kant's subsequent scheme. Cleanthes presents this doctrine 
as ' the most agreeable reflection which it is possible for human imagina- 
tion to suggest ', and Philo, admitting that ' these appearances are most 
engaging and alluring ', adds these somewhat significant words — ' and 
with regard to the true philosopher, they are more than appearances \ 



22 HUME'S ' DIALOGUES ' lect. 

It is only, therefore, a question of degree, and in actual dis- 
cussion it will often be found that they ' insensibly change 
sides,' the theist emphasizing the difference between God and 
man, and the atheist magnifying the analogy among all the 
operations of nature. What is there, then, to hinder an 
amicable adjustment of their differences? 'The whole of 
Natural Theology resolves itself ', in Philo's concluding 
words, ' into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous, at 
least undefined, proposition: That the cause or causes of 
order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to 
human intelligence.' ' The analogy, imperfect as it is, can 
be carried no farther than to the human intelligence; and 
cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to 
the other qualities of the mind.' The proposition, as he sig- 
nificantly admits, is one which ' affords no inference that 
affects human life, or can be the source of any action or 
forbearance ' ; and, if so, * what can the most inquisitive, 
contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, 
philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; 
and believe that the arguments on which it is established, 
exceed the objections which lie against it? ' 

Such is the nature of the attenuated theism to which Hume 
on all occasions so carefully adheres, and to which he some- 
times assigns a central importance in the foundation of that 
' philosophical and rational ' religion which he so sharply 
distinguishes from ' vulgar superstition \ It is here if any- 
where — in the importance he assigns to it rather than in the 
nature of the tenet itself — that the inconsistency to which 
Huxley refers may be found; for how can a proposition 
possess any religious significance if, as Philo truly describes 
it here, ' it affords no inference that affects human life, or 
can be the source of any action or forbearance ' ? Involun- 
tarily we recall the pragmatic test of truth by its practical 
consequences. And however much questionable matter we 
may find in pragmatist writers associated with this main 



i INSIGNIFICANT CONCLUSION 23 

contention or developed from it, we may well ask ourselves 
whether a proposition which has no practical consequences 
whatever is to be regarded as a truth at all. Is it not either 
meaningless or (as Hume here says) at least undefined? It 
is not without reason that theist and atheist so amicably 
shake hands over their differences, for the proposition con- 
tains nothing vital either to affirm or to deny. Certainly 
this is not what those who have contended for the existence 
of God have meant by that doctrine. To them it meant 
undoubtedly a doctrine which, if true, must profoundly 
affect our whole view of the universe and our conduct in it. 



// 



LECTURE II 

KANT AND THE IDEA OF INTRINSIC VALUE 

We have seen in the previous lecture the vague resid- 
uum of theistic belief which is all that Hume considered 
deducible from the evidence — a residuum, however, to 
which he clings through all his works with an almost 
curious tenacity. A proposition which ' affords no infer- 
ence that affects human life or can be the source of 
any action or forbearance ' seems a credo hardly worth 
contending for. If we mean by God an extra-mundane 
entity whose super-human intellectual powers are attested 
by the orderly arrangements and nice contrivances of the 
material scheme of things, but who is indifferent, so far as 
the phenomena enable us to judge, not only to human weal 
and woe, but also to the aspects of will and character which 
seem to us indubitably the highest and the best we know, 
the existence or non-existence of such a deity can hardly be 
a matter of human concern. It is surely not too much to say 
that the prominence given to the proof of intelligence in 
most of the arguments, especially the older arguments, for 
the existence of God, is due not so much to an interest in 
the merely cognitive powers — the super-human cleverness, 
as it were- — of the world-artificer as to the feeling that, to- 
gether with knowledge, we may expect to find in the Ground 
of things something akin to those elements of our being, 
rooted as they are in intelligence, in which we recognize our 
true dignity and worth. Whether we have just grounds for 
believing in such kinship is a question to be dealt with in the 
further course of these lectures, but certainly without it we 
cannot expect man to be satisfied, hardly indeed to be inter- 
ested. Intelligence has, as a matter of fact, for the greater 
thinkers always meant more than the abstract intellect. 



ii HUME'S RESTRICTED PREMISSES 25 

But the nature of Hume's conclusion was determined by 
the restricted nature of the premisses from which it is de- 
duced. It is explicitly based upon ' a contemplation of the 
works of nature ', ' the frame of nature V that is to say, upon 
the order and adjustments of the material system, to the ex- 
clusion of human nature and human experience in any other 
than its sense-perceptive aspect. Now Hume himself points 
out 2 that ' the first ideas of religion arose not from a con- 
templation of the works of nature, but from a concern with 
regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes 
and fears which actuate the human mind \ And although he 
contrasts ' the religious fictions and chimeras ' thence 
arising with ' the genuine principles of theism ', and counsels 
an escape from the violence of contending superstitions ' into 
the calm though obscure regions of philosophy ', it is in 
reality futile to rest a philosophical doctrine of God on 
a fragment of the evidence actually before us. It is possible 
that when we include in our survey the sentient creation 
and the facts of human history — ' the dread strife of poor 
humanity's afflicted will ' s — the whole may appear to us, in 
Hume's memorable phrase, ' a riddle, an enigma, an inex- 
plicable mystery '. But even if we risk such a result, how 
can we leave these facts out? They are in the very centre 
and foreground of the picture. It may be, moreover, that 
although they immensely increase the difficulty of the 
problem, they alone supply us with the hint of a concrete 
and tolerable solution. 

The general problem of philosophy, as every one knows, 
passed from the hands of Hume to those of Kant, and to 
Kant may be traced the most characteristic modern forms 
of the theistic argument. Kant's precise position is, in my 
opinion, no more tenable here than is the letter of his general 

1 These phrases are repeatedly used in the first two sections of the 
' Natural History of Religion '. 

2 In the ' Natural History of Religion '. 3 Excursion, Book VX 



26 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

theory of the constitution of experience; but he largely 
fixed the point of view from which the question has been 
discussed by subsequent thinkers. The contrast with 
Hume stares us in the face; for it is an analysis of man's 
moral experience which yields Kant his assurance of the 
existence of God, and it is the moral attributes, or (shall we 
say?) the moral interests, of the Deity which he is primarily 
concerned to establish. That is to say, instead of the com- 
plete indifference to natural and to moral evil alike which 
Hume attributes to his Supreme Mind, God is for Kant 
primarily and essentially the author and maintainer of a 
moral order. The universe as a moral system is the last 
word of the Kantian philosophy. It is not that Kant 
denies those aspects of human existence which leave upon 
Hume, as they have left on so many thoughtful observers 
since the world began, the vivid impression of a moral 
indifference. 

Streams will not curb their pride 

The just man not to entomb, 
Nor lightnings go aside 

To give his virtues room, 
Nor is that wind less rough that blows a good man's barge. 

The moral indifference of nature, or, as Professor Hux- 
ley more strongly phrased it, ' the unfathomable injustice of 
the nature of things ', is a problem as old as the Book of Job 
and older. Apart altogether from moral desert, what are 
we to make of the terrible contingencies of nature to which 
at every turn man is exposed — the agonies of the quivering 
flesh or the laceration of the spirit through his tenderest 
affections? All the apparently motiveless pain and misery 
of the world, on the face of it pure contingency — Hume was 
not the first to ask how such features of our experience are 
to be reconciled with the traditional conception of ' infinite 
benevolence, conjoined with infinite power and infinite 






ii KANT'S NEW FORMULATION 27 

wisdom \ Nor does Kant blink the facts. Indeed, when he 
speaks of the human lot and of the record of human history, 
the picture he paints is so dark that German pessimists of 
the nineteenth century have sought to claim him as one of 
themselves. 1 But it is only so long as we take happiness 
to be man's chief end or good, and regard the universe as 
1 a place of pleasure ', that Kant adopts this tone or allows 
it to be justified. If the world of time is really, as he holds 
I it is, the training ground of the spirit, if man's painful his- 
tory is but the long discipline by which a moral being is 
shaped out of a merely animal creature, then Kant's attitude 
is rather that of Browning in ' Rabbi ben Ezra '. 

The process can only be rightly judged in the light of 
what we take to be the end in view. And it is just here 
that Kant introduces his new formulation of the question, 
not only, as already indicated, by breaking away from the 
hedonistic, or at least eudaemonistic, presuppositions of his 
century, but still more by insisting that the preliminary to 
all fruitful discussion is to make clear to ourselves what we 
mean, or can intelligibly mean, by an ultimate End. This 
Kant fixes through the idea of value or worth which he puts 
in the forefront of his ethics. This idea is fundamental, 
I think, in all constructive thought since Kant's time, 
though it may disguise itself in different forms. It is cer- 
tainly dominant in contemporary discussion. 

' Nothing can possibly be conceived, in the world or out 
of it, which can be considered good without qualification 
except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgement, and the 
other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or 
courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of tempera- 
ment, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects ; 

1 For example, Von Hartmann in his Kant der Vater des modernen 
Pessimismus. Kant's philosophy of history is chiefly contained in the 
little treatise, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbiirgerlicher 
Absicht, in his review of Herder's Ideen, and in the tract, Muth- 
masslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte. 



28 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and 
mischievous if the will which is to make use of them, and 
which therefore constitutes what is called character, is not 
good. It is the same with the gifts of fortune. A rational 
and impartial spectator can have no pleasure in the sight of 
the uninterrupted prosperity of a being unadorned by a sin- 
gle feature of a pure and good will. Hence a good will ap- 
pears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being 
worthy of happiness. ... A good will is good not because 
of what it performs or accomplishes, not by its aptness for 
the attainment of some proposed end, but simply in virtue 
of its volition, that is, it is good in itself. . . . Even if it 
should happen that, owing to special disfavour of fortune 
or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this 
will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, 
. . . it would still shine like a jewel by its own light, as 
something which has its whole value in itself.' 1 In these 
well-known words Kant formulates the idea of ' absolute 
value ' as revealed in the moral personality, and from this, as 
his 7rov gtgd, he proceeds to build up his theory of the uni- 
verse as ' a realm of ends ' — a moral system, that is to say, 
whose ultimate purpose or raison d'etre is the realization of 
this supreme good in a community of ethical persons. 

In the light of this idea, which appears in Kant as a 
fundamental certainty, ' the frame of nature ', on which 
Hume's whole argument had been based, assumes a quite 
subordinate significance. ' Two things ', Kant has said, 
1 fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and 
awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect upon them, 
the starry heavens above and the moral law within.' But 
he did not hesitate to subordinate the former to the latter, 
and to restore man as an intelligence to that central posi- 
tion in the scheme of things, from which Copernicus had 

1 The opening sentences of the first section of the Grundlegung zur 
Metaphysik der Sitten (Abbott's translation, pp. 9-10). 



ii A REALM OF ENDS 29 

dethroned him as an animal creature. ' Stars and systems 
wheeling past ' would be but an unmeaning show, if they 
did not furnish the casket for the jewel of which he spoke. 
The use of the world, as Keats finely said, is to be ' the vale 
of soul-making '. ' Do you not see ', he says in one of his 
letters, ' how necessary a world of pains and trouble is to 
school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where 
the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. 
... As various as the lives of men are, so various become 
their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, sparks 
of his own essence.' a So to Kant the world becomes ulti- 
mately intelligible as a spiritual process — what his great con- 
temporary, Lessing, called a divine education — in Kant's 
eyes, too, an education of the race, but pre-eminently for him 
an education of the individual for a never-ending life of 
progress towards the ideal. Nature, he says, otherwise re- 
garded as a machine, receives the name of a ' realm ', a king- 
dom or system, when viewed in relation to rational beings as 
its ends. 2 It acquires in that light, we may say, a unity which 
otherwise does not belong to it; it becomes an element in 
a self-supporting system. Reason demands not merely the 
' is ' of bare fact, but the ' ought-to-be ', the ' deserves-to-be ' 
of absolute value. But, as Fichte was soon to put it, in the 
Kantian spirit, ' if matter alone existed, it would be just 
the same as if nothing at all existed \ a I have no desire 
to raise here the question at issue between Berkeleian 
idealism and realism, the question, I mean, whether a self- 
existent material universe is or is not a contradiction in 
terms. It is the question of value alone with which we are 
concerned ; and I think we may say without hesitation that, 
apart from the emotions which they may awaken in a ra- 
tional spectator, the kaleidoscopic transformations of ex- 

1 Letters of John Keats, edited by Sidney Colvin, p. 256. 

2 Grundlegang (Abbott), p. 57 ; Werke (ed. Hartenstein), vol. v, p. 286. 
8 Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 86. 



3 o KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

ternal nature possess in themselves no trace of that intrinsic 
value which must belong to what Kant calls an end-in-itself. 
They are all summed up in Spencer's phrase, the redistribu- 
tion of matter and motion; and, apart from conscious results 
which the process may condition, it is hard to see what 
interest lies for God or man in the infinite shiftings of the 
cosmic dust. Even if we include in our world the existence 
of sentient creatures, and these all happy, or, at least, 
with a surplus of pleasure over pain, this * green-grazing 
happiness of the herd ', as Nietzsche contemptuously calls 
it, would not give us the inherent worth which reason 
demands in a self-justifying end. The demand for such an 
end would seem to be as much a rational necessity as that 
which impels us to refund any phenomenon into its ante- 
cedent conditions — if it does not, indeed, represent a deeper 
principle of explanation, a deeper need of reason. Cer- 
tainly the human mind is not content to take the universe 
simply as a fact or set of interrelated facts. It is not 
intellectual coherence alone that the philosopher seeks — the 
fitting together, as it were, of the parts of some gigantic 
puzzle. The most perfect realization of unity in variety is 
as naught, if there is nowhere anything to which we can 
attach this predicate of value. If the philosophical impulse 
is to be satisfied, we must be able to repeat the verdict of 
the divine Labourer upon his world ; we must be able to say 
that the world is ' good ' in the sense of possessing intrinsic 
worth or value. 

Kant, the ethicist par excellence in modern philosophy, 
recognizes this quality exclusively in character or the moral 
will; and therefore this becomes for him the one end-in- 
itself, for whose realization the universe exists, and by which 
its existence is explained or justified. Even those who, 
like Professor Bosanquet, object most strongly to the too 
exclusive moralism of his theory, admit that his error is 
excusable, in so far as we get, in morality and religion, ' the 



ii DUTY AND FREEDOM 31 

essential and fundamental conditions ' of the perfect life, 
to which all other excellences — intellectual or artistic, 
for example — ' are relatively posterior and dependent '. 
' Morality ', says Professor Bosanquet, ' can more nearly 
stand alone, and its absence shakes the whole foundations 
of life and mind. Such absence is in respect to life as a 
whole, what a failure of belief in the first principles of ra- 
tional system is to intelligence.' r Accepting this justifica- 
tion of Kant's procedure, we may frankly accept also the 
implied criticism of his too exclusive attitude. The hack- 
neyed triad of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good is 
sufficient to remind us that there are at least two other phases 
of experience to which it would be strange to deny an 
intrinsic value. 

When Kant proceeds to work out the consequences of 
his fundamental conception, the result, as formulated in 
what he calls the ' Postulates of the Practical Reason ', is 
less satisfactory than might fairly have been anticipated. 
The postulates are three in number. First of all, the 
imperative of duty involves, as its self-evident condition, 
the Freedom of the being on whom the command is laid. 
1 Thou canst because thou oughtest.' Kant is speaking of 
human nature in the Idea, and he says that the being who 
can conceive the idea of a law possesses, in virtue of that 
very fact, the power of realizing it. We accept such 
responsibility when we condemn ourselves, as we do, for 
our own failures. So understood, freedom and intelligence 
go together. Kant repeatedly puts freedom on a different 
footing from the other two postulates. ' It is the only one 
of all the ideas of the speculative reason of which we know 
the possibility a priori, because it is the condition of the 
moral law which we know.' The possibility of the other two 
ideas (those of God and immortality) is proved, he says, ' by 
the fact that freedom actually exists, for this idea is revealed 
1 The Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 347-8. 



32 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

by the moral law.' 1 Twice over in the Critique of Judg- 
ment, he notes, as something ' very remarkable ', that in this 
case (and in this one case only) we have an Idea of Pure 
Reason ' whose object is a thing of fact and to be reckoned 
among scibilia \ 2 Duty and freedom, in short, are for Kant 
not so much two facts, one of which is inferred from the 
other, as two ways of characterizing the same experience. 3 

It is in his handling of the other postulates that we begin 
to feel a certain meagreness and externality in the treatment. 
Kant starts from the conception of the summum bonum as 
the object of the rational will, the end, that is to say, whose 
realization is enjoined by the law of duty; and, in formulat- 
ing it, the preacher of duty for duty's sake, who had so 
rigorously purged his ethics of all considerations of happi- 
ness or natural inclination, surprises us by the baldly 
hedonistic lines on which he rounds off his theory. Job 
is not to serve God for naught after all. Virtue, it is said, 
remains the supreme good (bonum supremum) inasmuch as 
it is ' the supreme condition of all our pursuit of happi- 
ness ', and remains therefore the formal maxim of the will. 
' But it does not follow that it is the whole and perfect 

1 Preface to Practical Reason (Abbott), p. 88. 

2 Critique of Judgment, section 91 (Bernard's translation, p. 405) : 
'There is one rational Idea (which is susceptible in itself of no presen- 
tation in intuition and consequently of no theoretical proof of its possi- 
bility) which also comes under things of fact. This is the idea of Free- 
dom, whose reality, regarded as a particular kind of causality, may be 
exhibited by means of practical laws of pure Reason, and conformably 
to this, in actual actions, consequently in experience. This is the only 
one of the Ideas of Pure Reason whose object is a thing of fact and to 
be reckoned among scibilia.' He notes this, both here and again on 
p. 413, as ' sehr merkwiirdig'. Compare also p. 414: ' All belief must be 
grounded upon facts. . . . All facts belong either to the natural concept, 
which proves its reality in the objects of sense, or to the concept of 
freedom, which sufficiently establishes its reality through the causality 
of reason in regard to certain effects in the world of sense, possible 
through it, which it incontrovertibly postulates in the moral law.' 

3 We find them expressly equated in the Critique of Practical Reason: 
1 this consciousness of the moral law, or what is the same thing, of free- 
dom' (Abbott, p. 135). 



ii THE SUMMUM BONUM 33 

good, as the object of the desires of rational finite beings; 
for this requires happiness also, and that not merely in the 
partial eyes of the person who makes himself an end, but 
even in the judgement of an impartial reason, which regards 
persons in general as ends in themselves.' Thus ' virtue 
and happiness together constitute the possession of the sum- 
mum bonum in a person, and the distribution of happiness 
in exact proportion to morality (which is the worth of a 
person and his worthiness to be happy) constitutes the 
summum bonum of a possible world; hence this summum 
bonum expresses the whole, the perfect good V An unkind 
critic might say that although the primacy is accorded to 
virtue as the supreme condition, yet the definition of virtue 
as ' worthiness to be happy ' seems, on the other hand, to 
put virtue in a merely instrumental relation towards happi- 
ness, as the real object of desire and the ultimate end of 
action. But however that may be, Kant's second and third 
postulates are directly deduced by him from this formula 
of the summum bonum. The postulate of immortality 
connects itself with the element of virtue or perfection; for 
the primary object of the moral individual must be the 
attainment of that conformity of his will with the moral 
law which would, in the eyes of a perfect and all-seeing 
Judge, constitute a passport to happiness. But such ' holi- 
ness ' of will is ' a perfection of which no rational being 
of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his 
existence \ 2 It must be found, therefore, in an infinite 
progress of approximation, and ' such an endless progress 
is possible only on the supposition of the endless duration 
of the existence and personality of the same rational being, 
which is what we mean by the immortality of the soul '. 
The existence of God is connected with the second element 
in the summum bonum; for the failure of the natural 

1 Abbott, p. 206. 

2 Ibid., p. 218. 



34 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

system of causes and effects to realize that distribution of 
happiness in exact proportion to morality which Kant's 
formula demands, involves the existence of God as a moral 
governor of the universe who will ultimately effect the 
adjustment required. In short, ' it is morally necessary 
to assume the existence of God.' x 

Kant's statement of the argument for immortality does 
not directly concern us at present. We may confine our- 
selves, therefore, to the third postulate, which is our proper 
subject. And here criticism naturally fastens on the ex- 
ternalism of the conception and on the peculiarly unfortunate 
nature of an argument which introduces God simply as a 
means to the happiness of individual human beings. Surely 
if, as Kant insists, it is wrong to treat a human being merely 
as a means, it must be a false way of putting things to pre- 
sent God himself in this merely instrumental light — as a deus 
ex machina introduced to effect the equation between virtue 
and happiness. Formulated thus, the argument is calculated 
to provoke Hume's reminder that to build one hypothesis 
upon another, by way of avoiding the conclusion suggested 
by the facts accessible to us, is ' building entirely in the air '. 
And although Kant would reply that his conclusion is based 
upon a fact of another order, namely, the fundamental de- 
liverance of the moral consciousness, he gravely misinter- 
prets that deliverance and its implications, in consequence of 
the sheerly individualistic and deistic habit of thought which 
he shares with Hume and the eighteenth century generally. 
It is upon the attitude of the moral man himself that the 
moral philosopher should base his theory. But the temper of 
true virtue is not the meticulous claim which Kant formu- 
lates for doles of happiness in exact proportion to individual 
merit. The temper of true virtue is rather that of Spinoza's 
closing proposition, Beatitudo non est virtutis praemium sed 
ipsa virtus. It claims no wages as the reward of its well- 
1 Abbott, p. 222. 



ii VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS 35 

doing, least of all does it keep a moral ledger with a debit 
and credit account to be evenly balanced. 

Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong, — 
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she; 
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be. 

The real postulate or implied presupposition of ethical 
action is simply that we are not acting in a world which 
nullifies our efforts, but that morality expresses a funda- 
mental aspect of reality, so that in our doings and strivings 
we may be said, in a large sense, to have the universe some- 
how behind us. Moral action, in short, implies the belief 
in a moral order, just as deliberate action of any sort im- 
plies belief in the orderly connectedness of physical nature. 
And of course that was the general idea which Kant intended 
to express — the broad idea of the universe as a divine moral 
order, not as a power hostile or indifferent to the life of eth- 
ical endeavour. But owing to the extraordinary hold which 
the individualism and the external deism of his century had 
over him, God seems to be introduced in Kant's moral theory 
almost as an after-thought, and He is connected with the law, 
not as its inspirer or author, but in the merely administrative 
capacity of Paymaster. Kant tells us, it is true, that after 
we have accepted the pure law of duty in ethical practice, 
we may go on to regard its injunctions, from the point of 
view of religion, as the commands of a divine lawgiver. But, 
as he hastens to add, the sanction thus super-added to the 
moral law has nothing to do with its inherent and self-im- 
posed authority, for man can be bound only by his own law. 

Here we meet Kant's great doctrine of the autonomy of 
the moral will as the foundation of an obligation that cannot 
be evaded. The self is bound by the law because the law 
is self-imposed ; it is its own law, and is recognized as such. 
But Kant does not see that, in this profound doctrine, he 
has opened the way to a truer conception of the relation be- 
tween the human and the divine than is represented by the 



36 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

painfully mechanical theory of a super-added, and strictly 
superfluous, 1 theological sanction. The fruitful idea of the 
self as at once the author and the subject of moral legislation 
— as laying down a law not only for the single self but for 
all men and, indeed, as Kant says, for all rational beings — 
naturally suggests the question whether such a self can still 
be treated as an isolated individual. 

I may illustrate my argument by a reference to certain 
statements of Dr. Martineau upon this very point. Mar- 
tineau, who was steeped, like Kant, in an inherited indi- 
vidualism, denies this doctrine of the autonomy of the will 
on the express ground that it violates the unitary and ex- 
clusive nature of personality. ' It takes two ', he says, 2 * to 
establish an obligation. . . . The person that bears the obli- 
gation cannot also be the person whose presence imposes it : 
it is impossible to be at once the upper and the nether mill- 
stone. Personality is unitary, and in occupying one side of 
a given relation is unable to be also on the other.' Hence 
he concludes that the sense of authority means * the recogni- 
tion of another than I, . . . another Person, greater and 
higher and of deeper insight.' This is the God of Deism, 
introduced to make good the sheer individualism of the self 
as a ' unitary personality ' ; and apart from this presup- 
position the argument has no force. That such is the 
presupposition is plain from the hypothetical examples 
by which Martineau seeks to justify his contention. He 
supposes * the case of one lone man in an atheistic universe ', 
and asks whether there could ' really exist any authority 
of higher over lower within the enclosure of his detached 
personality ' ; and he not unreasonably concludes that ' an 
insulated nature ', ' an absolutely solitary individual ', cannot 

1 Superfluous, and indeed noxious, so far as ethics is concerned. The 
reference to God seems in Kant solely connected with ' the attainment 
of the sutnmum bonum ' — ' the desired results ', ' the happy conse- 
quences ', which God guarantees (see Abbott, p. 226). 

2 Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii, pp. 96-9. 



n AUTONOMY AND IMMANENCE 37 

be conceived as the seat of authority at all. But the re- 
joinder is that such an individual is a pure myth, the crea- 
ture of a theory, and is certainly improperly spoken of as a 
self or a person. If any being were shut up, in Martineau's 
phrase, ' within the enclosure of his detached personality,' 
he would be a self-contained universe in himself, or rather 
he would be one bare point of mere existence. If intelli- 
gences were simply mutually exclusive points of subjectivity, 
then indeed they could not be the seats and depositaries 
of an objective law; they could not be the subjects of law 
at all. As I have said elsewhere, 1 ' consciousness of imper- 
fection, the capacity for progress, and the pursuit of per- 
fection, are alike possible to man only through the universal 
life of thought and goodness in which he shares, and which, 
at once an indwelling presence and an unattainable ideal, 
draws him " on and always on ".' The authority claimed by 
what is commonly called the higher self is thus only intel- 
ligible, if the ideals of that self are recognized as the imme- 
diate presence within us of a Spirit leading us into all truth 
and goodness. But the immanence of the divine was an idea 
foreign to Kant's whole way of thinking. Instead, therefore, 
of revising his conception of the self in view of its legislative 
function, he simply tells us that, while in ethics we must re- 
gard the law as self-imposed, we may go on in religion to 
regard its precepts as the commands of a Supreme Being, the 
reason assigned for so regarding them consisting in the fact 
that only through such a Being, morally perfect and at the 
same time all-powerful, can we hope to attain the summum 
bonum. 

But after we have discarded the eighteenth-century frame- 
work of the Kantian scheme, the central and permanently 
important position remains — the idea of intrinsic value as 
ultimately determinative in a philosophical reference, as 
yielding us, in the Kantian phrase, an intelligible world, 
1 The Philosophical Radicals and other Essays, pp. 97-8. 



38 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

which, when recognized, sets limits to the exclusive preten- 
sions of the world of sense-perception, and defines the mode 
or degree of reality which belongs to that world in the total 
scheme of things. This conception of intrinsic value as the 
clue to the ultimate nature of reality is the fundamental con- 
tention of all idealistic philosophy since Kant's time. It is 
the living assumption at the root of the great speculative 
systems to which the Kantian theory immediately gave rise 
in Germany. This is obvious in Fichte's case, to whom the 
consciousness of the moral law is the ultimate evidence of his 
own reality, and the universe itself only the material of duty. 
If it lies less on the surface in Hegel, it is merely because in 
him Idealism is no longer militant but triumphant, and be- 
cause the system as a whole is the explication of the supreme 
conviction on which it is built. In this respect, what the 
great German idealists substantially did was to enlarge and 
complete Kant's conception of intrinsic value by making it 
include all the higher reaches of human experience. The 
moral experience is still predominant in Fichte : the aesthetic 
comes to its rights in Schelling, with perhaps even an over- 
emphasis. In Hegel the claims of the theoretical and the 
practical (Truth, Beauty, and Goodness) are more evenly 
balanced, while the stress laid on religion as the bearer of 
human culture, and as presenting, in its own form, the sub- 
stance of philosophical truth, goes far to refute the common 
criticism that the intrinsic values of concrete experience are 
sacrificed in his system to a logical abstraction. 

And if the idea of value thus operates as an assumption in 
Kant's immediate successors, it becomes still more markedly 
the watchword of Idealism in the long duel with an en- 
croaching Naturalism, which was the engrossing concern of 
the nineteenth century, and which has shaped for us the 
specific form in which the theistic problem, as the ultimate 
question of philosophy, presents itself to the modern mind. 
All through the period mentioned, the problem of construe- 



ii EXISTENCE AND VALUE 39 

tive thought has been the relation of our ideals or values to 
the ultimate ground of things. So Sidgwick, lecturing in 
the nineties in his carefully balanced way on ' The Scope 
of Philosophy ', defined its ' final and most important task ' 
as the problem of ' connecting fact and ideal in some rational 
and satisfactory manner V And at the present day, 
philosophical discussion is carried on more explicitly in 
terms of value than at any previous time. Take for exam- 
ple two such representative thinkers as Hoffding and Win- 
delband, — than whom it would be difficult to name two con- 
temporary writers more balanced in judgement or more 
catholic in their outlook. Hoffding's Philosophy of Reli- 
gion lays down ' the conservation of value ', or ' the convic- 
tion that no value perishes out of the world ', as the charac- 
teristic axiom of religion, while the problem alike of religion 
and of philosophy is said to be ' the relation between what 
seems to us men the highest value and existence as a whole '. 2 
And Windelband expresses the present philosophical situa- 
tion thus : ' We do not so much expect from philosophy what 
it was formerly supposed to give, a theoretic scheme of the 
world, a synthesis of the results of the separate sciences, 
or, transcending them on lines of its own, a scheme har- 
moniously complete in itself; what we expect from philoso- 
phy to-day is reflection on those permanent values which 
have their foundation in a higher spiritual reality above 
the changing interests of the times.' 3 

I have said that the debate between Naturalism and 
Idealism dominates the whole of the second half of 
the nineteenth century, and that it has bequeathed to 
us the peculiarly modern form of the theistic problem. 
We shall see in the following lecture how the formu- 

1 H. Sidgwick, Philosophy, its Scope and Relations, p. 30. 

2 pp. 6, 9-10 (English translation). 

8 In his lectures, published in 1909, Die Philosophie im deutschen 
Geistesleben des ig ten Jahrhunderts, p. 119. 



40 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

lation of the issue was determined — determined, I think, 
unfortunately — by specific features of the Kantian philoso- 
phy. In the meantime, if we recall briefly the larger aspects 
of this perennial philosophical antithesis, it will be seen that 
the idea of value is central and decisive throughout. It is, at 
bottom, the question of the divineness or the undivineness of 
the universe. Is the universe the expression of a transcend- 
ent Greatness and Goodness, or is it, in ultimate analysis, a 
collection of unknowing material facts? In the plain im- 
pressive words of Marcus Aurelius — ' The world is either a 
welter of alternate combination and dispersion or a unity of 
order and providence. If the former, why do I care about 
anything else than how I shall at last become earth? But 
on the other alternative, I reverence, I stand steadfast, I find 
heart in the power that disposes all.' From our human 
point of view, this alternative must necessarily take some 
such form as this : ' Is the spirit of the universe or the ulti- 
mate nature of things akin to what we recognize as greatest 
and best, or are such standards and distinctions but human 
parochialisms, sheerly irrelevant in a wider reference?' 
Somehow thus we must express it, for we have no other 
criterion which we can apply than the values which we rec- 
ognize as intrinsic and ultimate. Hence the immediate form 
of the question — the form also which discloses the intensely 
practical interest which inspires it — is as to the relation of 
man and his human values or ideals to the universe in which 
he finds himself. Is our self-conscious life with its ideal 
ends but the casual outcome of mechanical forces, indifferent 
to the results which by their combinations they have unwit- 
tingly created, and by their further changes will as unwit- 
tingly destroy, or is it the expression, in its own measure, 
of the Power that works through all change and makes it 
evolution? Is the ultimate essence and cause of all things 
' only dust that rises up and is lightly laid again ', or is it the 
Eternal Love with which Dante closes his vision, ' the Love 



ii THE GREAT ALTERNATIVE 41 

that moves the sun and the other stars ' ? On the one hy- 
pothesis, as Mr. Balfour has put it in a passage of poignant 
beauty, with the final run-down of the solar system, as 
science predicts it, ' man will go down into the pit, and all 
his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which 
in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the con- 
tented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will 
know itself no longer. " Imperishable monuments " and 
" immortal deeds ", death itself, and love stronger than 
death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything 
that is be better or worse for all that the labour, genius, 
devotion, and suffering of man have striven through count- 
less ages to effect.' 1 Naturalism seems to teach that when 
we resolve the universe, as it were, into its real constituents, 
it reduces itself to the ceaseless redistribution of matter and 
motion, what William James not inaptly describes as the 
' vast driftings of the cosmic weather '. 

Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that such a theory 
is intellectually conceivable ; it would still remain incredible, 
because it outrages the deepest convictions on which our 
life is built. Our sense of value is not a matter of selfish 
preference or individual desire; the judgement of value is 
as impartial as it is unhesitating. It is as objective in its 
own sphere as a scientific judgement on matters of fact. 
On points of detail the sense of value may be open to criti- 
cism and susceptible of education, just as scientific state- 
ments are open to revision. But in its pronouncements as to 
what possesses value and what does not — in its recognition 
of the main forms of value, and in its general scale of higher 
and lower — it represents an unswerving conviction which is, 
even prima facie, at least as important an element in the 
philosophical question as the scientific theories on which 
Naturalism builds; and if the scope of these theories be 
shown in a truer light, it may well become of determining 
1 Foundations of Belief, p. 31. 



42 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

significance for our conception of ultimate reality. Idealism 
takes its stand on the essential truth of our judgements of 
value, and the impossibility of explaining the higher from 
the lower. Beauty and goodness are not born of the clash of 
atoms; they are effluences of something more perfect and 
more divine. 

I would venture to dwell for a few moments on this point 
of the objectivity of our judgements of value. It is all- 
important in the discussion of values and ideals to realize 
that these are in no sense private ends which we seek to 
impose upon the universe, and that it is not the disappoint- 
ment of our selfish hopes which is the real explanation of 
our revulsion from the naturalistic creed. It is frequently 
implied in naturalistic polemic that the idealist view is no 
better than a sentimental clinging to the illusions of man's 
youth, a weak refusal to look the facts in the face and accept 
the world as it is. But Lotze, in a famous passage, has ex- 
posed the falsity of this ostentatious worship of truth, this 
' sham heroism, which glories in renouncing what no man 
has a right to renounce \ 1 When man confronts the world 
with his standards of value, his attitude is not that of a sup- 
pliant but of a judge. He does not appear as one who craves 
a kindness, but as one who claims a right ; or rather, as in- 
vested with the authority of a higher tribunal, he pronounces 
sentence on the travesty of a universe which materialism 
offers him. It is all the more important, therefore, that in 
staking the idealistic position on the objective significance of 
human values, we should avoid, as far as possible, any ex- 
pression that might seem to savour of merely personal wish. 
From this point of view, the title of a recent article in the 
Hibbert Journal 2 — ' Is the Universe friendly ? ' — seems to 

1 Preface to the Mikrokosmos. 

2 January 1912. My reference, I wish to add, is only to the title, and 
in no way to the substance of Professor Ladd's article, which I had not 
read at the time. The title, as stated in the opening sentences, is taken 
from a recorded saying of F. W. H. Myers. 



. 



ii OBJECTIVITY OF VALUES 43 

me to strike a false note; it has just that suggestion of the 
whining and pitiful which I have been deprecating. The 
question is rather whether the nature of the ultimately real 
is to be found on the lines of what we recognize as greatest 
and best in our own experience. So, again, the argument 
from human ' needs ' (which in its legitimate form is iden- 
tical with that which we are considering) requires to be care- 
fully safeguarded, if it is not to invite misconception. Man, 
as Kant has said, is an end-in-himself ; but we must be care- 
ful to avoid expressions which would imply that human 
beings, as given finite personalities, constitute the final pur- 
pose or the central fact of the universe, in the sense that the 
whole framework of being is to be regarded as the instru- 
ment of their individual destiny. We have seen that Kant 
himself, in formulating his postulates, erred in this direction, 
first in the prominence given to happiness, and secondly, in 
the merely instrumental function assigned to God. Sir 
William Hamilton, proceeding on somewhat similar lines, 
was betrayed into a grosser lapse when he allowed himself 
to say : ' A God is, indeed, to us only of practical interest, 
inasmuch as he is the condition of our immortality.' r Prac- 
tical interest in a God — what a phrase and what an attitude ! 
The glories of the outer world, the splendours and sanctities 
of the inner world, and no interest in God save as a security 
for our continued existence ! I am reminded by contrast of 
a passage in a lecture by your own Principal, in which he 
deals with this theme of personal immortality in relation to 
Old Testament study. After arguing for the truth of the 
doctrine as the outcome of the highest religious experience, 
he continues : ' Yet while this is true, it is well for us all 
sometimes to pitch our religious life in terms which do not 
include the hope of a future. Most of the crises of religious 
experience may be achieved, as some of the grandest Psalms 
fulfil their music, without the echo of one of the far-off bells 
1 Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. i, p. 32. 



44 KANT AND INTRINSIC VALUE lect. 

of heaven. A man may pass through the evangelical 
experiences of conversion, regeneration and redemption, 
without thinking any more of the future than the little child 
thinks, but only sure and glad that his Father is with him. 
The Old Testament is of use in reminding us that the hope 
of immortality is one of the secondary and inferential 
elements of religious experience.' * 

I am not arguing here against immortality any more than 
your Principal in the passage I have quoted; but I think 
that we place an exaggerated emphasis upon it, if we make 
it the centre and foundation of our whole world-theory. 
We all remember how prominent is the place held by the 
idea in the thought of the two greatest Victorian poets, 
Tennyson and Browning, and to what noble uses they turn 
it. But in Tennyson at least, we may perhaps admit that 
the emphasis tends to become unhealthy. He is recorded 
as saying in conversation that if immortality 'be not true, 
then no God but a mocking fiend created us. . . . I'd sink 
my head to-night in a chloroformed handkerchief and have 
done with it all/ 2 A number of passages, less violent in 
expression but substantially to the same effect, might be 
quoted from the poems. 3 

Against such an utterance I would venture to put, as 
conveying a saner and a larger view, a passage of Dr. 

1 George Adam Smith, Modem Criticism and the Preaching of the 
Old Testament, p. 176. 

2 Recorded by James Knowles, Nineteenth Century, January 1893. As 
he spoke, Knowles says, Tennyson grew ' crimson with excitement '. 
1 His belief in personal immortality was passionate— I think almost the 
strongest passion he had.' 

3 e. g. In Memoriam, xxxiv : 

'Twere best at once to sink to peace, 
Like birds the charming serpent draws, 
To drop head foremost in the jaws 
Of vacant darkness and to cease. 
Compare the lines to Fitzgerald (dedicatory introduction to Tiresias), 
and contrast with Tennyson's utterances the well-known words of 
Socrates: ' If the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to 
the unjust, it is better to die than to live.' 



ii A QUESTION OF PROPORTION 45 

Hutchison Stirling's, quoted in his recently published Life. 
Dr. Stirling himself, it may be as well to say, held the con- 
viction of immortality with peculiar intensity, yet he writes : 
' We shall not speak of love or of one's daily meals, or of 
science or of Shakespeare; but he who has seen the sea and 
the blue of heaven, and the moon and the stars, who has 
clomb a mountain, who has heard a bird in the woods, who 
has spoken and been spoken to, who has seen a sock or a 
shoe of his own child, who has known a mother — he will 
bow the knee and thank his God and call it good, even 
though his lot in the end be nothingness.' x This is to see 
things in a truer proportion, and philosophy is largely a ques- 
tion of proportion. We cannot afford to stake our whole 
position on anything ' secondary and inferential ', however 
well-assured we may ourselves be of its truth. Personal im- 
mortality, as the history of the race abundantly shows, is not 
an absolute necessity, in the sense that without it the world 
becomes a sheer irrationality. There is certainly possible 
a disinterested devotion to ideals whose triumph, as we quite 
simply say, we shall not be there to see. We feel that we 
are sharers in a wider life, and we feel that it is good to 
have been admitted to share it. It is the spirit of the aged 
Simeon : ' Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace 
. . . for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.' But that our 
ideals themselves should perish, that nothing worth existing 
should have any pledge of continuance or growth, that the 
world of values, in short, should have no relation to the 
world of facts — that is the one intolerable conclusion. And 
just because its intolerableness has nothing to do with any 
private hopes or fears, we feel that the refusal to entertain 
it is a judgement of objective validity, that it is, in short, of 
the same texture as the inability to believe an intellectual 
contradiction. 

1 James Hutchison Stirling, His Life and Work, p. 251. 



LECTURE III 

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY DUEL BETWEEN 
IDEALISM AND NATURALISM 

In the two preceding lectures we have seen how the 
problem of theism presented itself to Hume and Kant, the 
two thinkers who stand in the mid-stream of the modern 
philosophical movement, and whose influence may be 
discerned in most of its subsequent course. Neither of 
them can be said to have emancipated himself from the 
external deism of his age and environment; but in other 
respects the contrast between the two is so great that we 
seem, in passing from one to the other, to be traversing a 
different country and breathing a different atmosphere. The 
starting-point, method and goal of the reasoners seem to 
have little in common, when we compare Hume's critical 
' contemplation of the works of nature ' and its exiguous 
result with the Kantian argument which rests the whole 
case on the intrinsic worth of the moral personality. I 
criticized a certain externality and poverty of feeling in 
the formal arguments by which Kant establishes the postu- 
lates of immortality and the existence of God. But his 
central idea of value, as a determining factor in philosophical 
explanation, I took to be not only sound in itself but the 
fundamental contention of all idealistic philosophy since 
his time. 

In Kant's immediate successors, I said, the idea of 
value operates as an assumption, and it is entirely 
detached by them from the special associations of the 
Kantian theory of knowledge. The actual phrase first 
occurs as a watchword in the long duel between Naturalism 
and Idealism which followed the collapse of the great 



in THE HEART AND THE REASON 47 

idealistic systems and dominated the whole of the second 
half of the nineteenth century; and it reappears there in 
a more distinctively Kantian form. The modern formula- 
tion of the ultimate issue as between Naturalism and Ideal- 
ism has, indeed, been mainly determined by two features 
of the Kantian philosophy — on the one hand, by the cri- 
terion of value of which we have been speaking and, on 
the other hand, by the abrupt separation which Kant makes 
between the theoretic and the practical reason — between 
the objective certitude, or knowledge, attainable in the scien- 
tific sphere and the subjective certitude, or faith, on which 
our ethical postulates rest. If the former feature 
furnished Idealism with her positive credo, the latter was 
largely responsible, as we shall presently see, for the dis- 
advantageous conditions under which she had often to fight 
her battles. For, as I have already partly indicated, the 
principle of value may either be employed simply and 
directly, as an immanent presupposition rather than as mat- 
ter of controversial assertion — so we find it on the whole in 
the greater thinkers — or it may appear as a protest of the 
remaining part of our nature against what it takes to be the 
usurpation of authority by the pure intellect. As it was 
phrased by Pascal, ' the heart has its reasons, of which the 
reason knows nothing.' It is in this latter form that the 
argument frequently tends to appear in the controversy with 
Naturalism during the period to which I have referred; 
and perhaps it is hardly possible when engaged in such 
a controversy to avoid statements which seem to 
imply a dualism and a conflict between two sides of our 
nature. The more, however, this dualism is emphasized, 
the more insecure the results claimed by the sense of value 
will come to appear. The heart, as Tennyson says, may 
stand up * like a man in wrath ' ' against the freezing 
reason's colder part ' ; 1 but strength of assertion will not 
1 In Memoriam, cxxiv. 



48 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

suffice to banish the recurring doubt that, however cold and 
unacceptable we may find the conclusions of the reason, 
they may nevertheless be true — nay, must be so, unless 
the premisses of Naturalism can be invalidated. The reas- 
sertion of human values is, in point of fact, effective and 
convincing only when it is accompanied by the demonstra- 
tion that the conclusions of Naturalism rest on a misin- 
terpretation of the nature of the scientific theories on which 
they are based. And this may be shown, I think, by 
philosophical criticism to be the case, without abandoning 
the guidance of reason or indulging in any campaign against 
' intellectualism \ 

We have first, however, to see how the philosophical ques- 
tion actually shaped itself during the last sixty years; and 
examination will show that the way was paved for the 
more subjective, and essentially more sceptical, statement 
of the principle of value, by the specific form in which Kant 
cast his results, no less than by the immense prestige 
acquired by science during the period in question. I have 
referred to the abrupt separation made by Kant between 
the theoretical and the practical reason. That separation 
or dualism may be attributable in part to Kant's favourite 
method of ' isolating ' his problems, and the subsequent 
difficulty of co-ordinating the results of his separate in- 
quiries. But in the present case it must be admitted that 
Kant keeps steadily in view the complementary relation of 
the first two Critiques; the statement of the results of the 
analysis of scientific knowledge in the Pure Reason is con- 
stantly punctuated by forward references to the conclusions 
worked out in the Practical Reason. The nature of Kant's 
theory of knowledge is really explained by the relation of 
his undertaking to the scientific knowledge of his time. 
' If you read the Critique of Pure Reason/ says M. Bergson, 
' you see that Kant has criticized not reason in general, 
but a reason fashioned to the habits and exigencies of the 



in THE KANTIAN CATEGORIES 49 

Cartesian mechanism or the Newtonian physics.' * Modern 
philosophy was born along with modern science, or, to be 
more strictly correct, it followed close upon it, as a reflec- 
tive analysis and generalization of its methods and results. 
The extent to which the physics of Galileo is transfused 
into the systems of the founders of modern philosophy has 
become a historical commonplace. It is seen in Descartes 
and Spinoza no less than in Hobbes and Gassendi. Com- 
pleted by the genius of Newton, the world-scheme of 
mathematical physics has stood, almost down to our own 
day, as the ultimate ideal of knowledge which, if we could 
realize it in respect of the molecular constitution of bodies, 
would reveal to us, as Locke thought, their hidden 
' essence \ 

The categories of Kant are, in this respect, a philosophical 
generalization of the Newtonian astronomy; the reciprocal 
interaction of material particles in space is the kind of 
experience, the logical conditions of whose possibility they 
summarize. ' How is mathematics possible ? ' and ' How is 
pure physics possible ? ' — into these two questions Kant 
translates his inquiry in the Prolegomena. To this experi- 
ence the title of knowledge is restricted; within this sphere 
alone is logical certainty attainable. Kant acknowledges, it 
is true — or rather, he insists — that the action of the moral 
will finds no place in this world-scheme; and as it is in 
the self responsive to duty, capable of moral goodness or 
badness, that he finds the real man and the only example 
of intrinsic value, he brands the world of knowledge as 
merely phenomenal, when contrasted with the real world 
of moral persons and actions. But, in the historical 
sequel, the honorific title of Knowledge, as compared 
with the Faith or Belief on which he bases the verities 

1 Le parallelisme psychophysique et la metaphysique positive. The 
passage is quoted by Mr. A. D. Lindsay in the introduction to his 
Philosophy of Bergson. 



50 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

of the ethical world, proved more potent than the 
disparaging adjective phenomenal, especially when the 
real world from which the phenomenal is distinguished 
was described by so mystically-sounding a term as 
noumenal. 

A similar impression is produced by Kant's halting treat- 
ment of aesthetic experience and of the organism in the 
Critique of Judgment. While recognizing in both cases a 
range of experience which his categories fail to express, he 
refuses to treat the aesthetic and the biological account of 
the phenomena as more than a subjective way of looking 
at facts which, were our analysis keen enough, might yet 
be reduced to instances of mechanical determination. In 
this way, the impression is fostered that scientific explana- 
tion must always be in terms of mathematical physics — that 
science and mathematical physics are in fact interchangeable 
terms, and that any phenomena which refuse to be reduced 
to mechanical terms may be treated as a subjective gloss 
upon the text of objective knowledge. And the ethical doc- 
trine, despite its primacy for Kant himself, and in spite 
of the part it played in his idealistic successors, came in 
like manner to be regarded by many as an after-thought 
on the philosopher's part, intended to atone for the 
iconoclasm of the first Critique, or, at best, as an uncalled- 
for and bafrling addition to an otherwise clear and consistent 
doctrine. 

We may hold — and I do hold — that to read Kant's 
philosophy thus is wholly to misread its author's inten- 
tion, and to neglect the plain indications of the solidarity of 
the three Critiques as integral parts of a coherent scheme. 
Nevertheless, the broad fact remains, if we leave out of 
account in the meantime the great idealistic movement 
which was the immediate sequel of the Kantian philosophy 
in Germany, that, for the average nineteenth-century 
thinker, it was the negative side of Kant's teaching — the 



in AGNOSTIC INTERPRETATIONS 51 

critical limitation of knowledge to the world of sense-per- 
ception — that was of real significance; and the Kantian 
phenomenalism came to be identified with a somewhat 
facile agnosticism or relativism. Kant himself had treated 
physical science as the type and norm of true knowledge, 
and accordingly the prestige of purely physical explanations 
within the world of experience was hardly lessened by the 
formal acknowledgement at the end that the world we know 
is only the appearance to us of an unknown and unknow- 
able reality. Such is the type of thought which meets us 
in Spencer and Huxley. Spencer did adopt a percentage 
of Kantian doctrine, as distilled by Sir William Hamilton; 
Huxley appeals as readily to Berkeley and Hume and 
physiological psychology as to Kant. Both thinkers are 
able, when challenged, to repudiate the charge of material- 
ism, and they do so quite honestly. Nevertheless, their 
effective thinking is done entirely in physical terms, and 
the result is a sheer materialistic mechanism with conscious- 
ness as an epiphenomenon — an inactive and strangely 
superfluous accompaniment of the machinery. It is 
sufficient to refer to Spencer's reduction of the universe 
to a problem in the re-distribution of matter and motion, 
and to Huxley's theory of conscious automata, as an 
indication of the kind of doctrine which was thought 
in the seventies of last century to be imposed upon us 
.alike by the criticism of knowledge and by the results of 
science. 

In much closer relation to Kant, and more typical in its 
attitude, was Lange's widely influential History of Material- 
ism, the first edition of which appeared in 1865. Lange's 
work was an important factor in promoting the ' return 
to Kant ' which was so prominent a feature of the later 
decades of the nineteenth century. His own neo-Kan- 
tianism, which is intended to be a translation of Kant into 
the terms of modern scientific thought, is no doubt more 



52 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

correctly described by the late Professor Adamson as a 
reproduction of Hume in terms of physiological psychology; 
for Lange has left out of his statement all the profounder 
elements in the Kantian philosophy. But the historically 
important fact was the contemporary acceptance of this 
somewhat shallow relativism as the permanent outcome of 
Kant's teaching. For Lange's History, well-written and 
with a fine ethical undertone, was widely read, and formed 
the historical and philosophical staple of contemporary men 
of science when they entered the speculative field. Now 
Lange explicitly identifies reality (Wirklichkeit) with the 
mechanistic scheme as materialism presents it. But ' one 
thing is certain ', he adds, ' namely, that man requires a 
completion of reality by an ideal world which he creates 
for himself, and in the creation of which the highest and 
noblest of his spiritual functions co-operate/ And he 
points to Schiller's philosophical poems as the best example 
of such imaginative creation, in which the spirit takes its 
flight ' in das Gedankenland der Schonheit ', and finds there 
not only aesthetic satisfaction, but also ethical harmony 
and religious peace. The future of religion and of specu- 
lative metaphysics lies, according to him, in this free poetic 
creation of a spiritual home (Heimath der Geister) in which 
our highest ideals are realized. And inasmuch as, in the 
spirit of Kant, we recognize the ' real ' world of science to 
be itself but a phenomenon, a product of our intellectual 
organization, Lange holds, as against dogmatic materialism, 
that we have a certain right to solace ourselves with such 
speculative creations. Experience, |ie says, is the product 
not of our organization alone, but of that organization in 
commerce with ' unknown factors ' — with a foreign power 
which partly lays compulsion upon us, partly allows itself 
to be moulded to our ends. All the ' knowledge ' of this 
power that we can attain to is the categorized world of sense- 
perception, but it may be that the ideals of art and religion 



in LANGE'S REFUGE IN POETRY 53 

point us to its more intimate nature. At all events, they are 
the sources of all that man has ever reverenced as divine; 
and it is as ' free poesy ', and not as theoretic truth, that this 
■ world of values ' succeeds in lifting our spirits above the 
lets and hindrances of time. Vaihinger, writing some ten 
years later as a sympathetic expositor and disciple, was more 
emphatic than Lange himself in bidding us remember that 
the world of the speculative imagination is no more than ' a 
subjective ideal, with no claim to represent reality V 

So interpreted, it is obvious that the ' flight to the 
ideal ' becomes no better than an elaborate process of 
self-deception — a painful effort to shut our eyes to the 
features of what we know in our heart to be the real 
nature of existence. And if that is so, it is equally obvious 
that the impulse to shape a fairer and a nobler world must 
speedily wither at the root. The function can only be 
sustained by some degree of faith in the reality of the 
vision. As Martineau eloquently puts it at the outset of 
his Study of Religion : ' Amid all the sickly talk about 
" ideals " which has become the commonplace of our age, 
it is well to remember that, so long as they are a mere self- 
painting of the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity 
or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine 
and broken by the passing wind. . . . The very gate of 
entrance to [religion] is the discovery that your gleaming 
ideal is the everlasting Real, no transient brush of a fancied 
angel's wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of 
the Soul of souls : short of this there is no object given 
you.' 2 The wavering position of Lange and the more 
definitely negative position of Vaihinger prove sufficiently 
that, in spite of their would-be Kantian theory of knowledge, 
the mechanical system in space and time remains the bed- 
rock of their world-theory. 

1 Harttnann, Diihring und Lange, p. 18. 

2 Study of Religion, vol. i, p. 13. 



54 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

A decade earlier than Lange's History, the crass and 
blatant materialism which spread over Germany after the 
collapse of Hegelian idealism had drawn from Lotze, in 
the preface to the Mikrokosmos (1856), his memorable 
protest against the ' presumptuous boldness ' with which, in 
the name of science and a supposed service of truth for 
truth's sake, many gloried in renouncing and trampling on 
all that has been held most sacred by the soul of man. 
As he pointed out, his own early work in philosophy had 
been in support of an extension to organic life of a purely 
mechanical method of explanation in contrast to the old 
vitalistic theory. He was thus in no way inclined by his 
antecedents to contest the claims of mechanism to be the 
universal and only legitimate mode of scientific explanation. 
But (as he summarized his own position), while recognizing 
how absolutely universal is the extent, he recognized also 
how completely subordinate is the significance , of the func- 
tion which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the 
world. He emphasizes this conviction in the distinction he 
draws, on Kantian lines, between the world of forms and 
the world of values. The former, the world regarded as 
a mere succession of facts, of changing shapes, cannot be 
conceived as self-subsistent. The function of mechanism 
is, in short, essentially instrumental; as Leibnitz said, 
Causae efUcientes pendent a finalibus. ' The scientific under- 
standing has to be supplemented by the reason appreciative 
of value.' x For truth itself, he says again, we demand 
a value, and this value, this justification, it can attain only 
as an element in the total life of an intelligent being. If 
truth were merely the reflection in consciousness of an 
already existent world, this ' barren rehearsal ' would have 
no self-sustaining value or significance, such as those who 
deify truth for truth's sake seem to suppose. Truth, there- 

1 Mikrokosmos, Book II, chap. v. 



in LOTZE'S MIKROKOSMOS 55 

fore, as Plato said, is subordinate to the general conception 
of the Good, and the world of forms must receive its final 
explanation from the world of values whose medium it is. 
This Lotze offers as his immovable conviction rather than 
as the result of a philosophical demonstration. He empha- 
sizes indeed the impossibility of any such deductive cer- 
tainty as Hegelian idealism seemed to claim to possess. 
Speaking of the alternatives of Naturalism and Idealism, 
he says, ' I cannot for a moment doubt that the latter 
alternative is alone permissible; the whole sum of Nature 
can be nothing else than the condition for the realization of 
the Good. . . . But this decided conviction indicates only 
an ultimate and farthest goal that may give our thoughts 
their direction : it does not indicate knowledge that deserves 
the name of science, in the sense, namely, that it can be 
formulated in a demonstrable doctrine. To our human 
reason a chasm that cannot be filled, or at least that has 
never yet been filled, divides the world of values from the 
world of forms. . . . With the firmest conviction of the 
undivided unity of the two we combine the most distinctly 
conscious belief in the impossibility of this unity being 
known.' x 

Lotze's statement remains typically Kantian in the 
* chasm ' it makes between the world of forms, as the sole 
object of knowledge, and the world of values, as resting on 
merely subjective conviction. The world of knowledge is 
also apparently identified by him, as by Kant, with the 
mechanistically conceived world of physical science. In 
some ways, indeed, Lotze's statement of the position im- 
presses a reader as even more subjective and apologetic than 
Kant's — perhaps owing to the critical and balancing char- 
acter of his mind and the reaction which can constantly 
be detected in him against what he deemed the over- 

1 Mikrokosmos, Conclusion of Book III. 



56 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

statements of speculative idealism. In spite of the firm 
assertion of the principle of value, there is wanting some- 
how the magisterial tone which seems to invest Kant's 
ethical pronouncements with an objectivity of their own. 
But Lotze's statement of the philosophical problem, as 
a conflict between supposed or apparent results of science 
and the cherished objects of religious faith, truthfully re- 
flects the attitude of thoughtful men during the latter half of 
the nineteenth century. This conflict provides philosophy 
during the period with its subject-matter, and in Lotze's 
view the problem does not admit of an intellectually coercive 
solution. The contribution of philosophy to an intellectual 
harmony, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to 
a modus vivendi, is to point out the limitations of the merely 
scientific point of view — the * disinterested understanding ' 
as he calls it in one place — and to vindicate ' the belief that, 
in its feeling for the value of things and their relations, our 
reason possesses as genuine a revelation as, in the principles 
of logical investigation, it has an indispensable instrument 
of experience '- 1 

Largely through Lotze's influence on Albrecht Ritschl, 
his colleague at Gottingen, the idea of value passed into 
theological thought. Formulating in the sharpest way the 
opposition between theoretic and religious knowledge, 
Ritschl sought to base theology exclusively on ' judgements 
of value ', and thus place its doctrines on a foundation 
independent of controversies as to scientific matter of 
fact. There is much that is profoundly true in Ritschl's 
attempt to purge traditional doctrines of what he calls 
their ' metaphysical ' accretions, and to restore to them (or 
to give to them) a purely religious significance; and it 
is matter of common knowledge that Ritschlianism, de- 
veloped as it has been by a singularly able band of pupils 
and followers, has been perhaps the most important theo- 
1 Book II, chap, v (English translation, vol. i, p. 245). 



in RITSCHL AND THEOLOGY 57 

logical movement of the last forty years. But it is impossible 
to maintain, in the rigidity of its original formulation, the 
opposition between judgements of value and judgements of 
fact. Unless the objects of religious faith are real, theology 
is entirely in the air; and if they are real it is impossible 
to treat the world of religious belief and the world of fact, 
as science and philosophy handle it, as if they were two 
non-communicating spheres. Reality is one, and, after 
all, the human mind is also one, and not a bundle of un- 
connected and conflicting faculties. Our various modes of 
apprehending reality must have a relation to one another 
through their common basis both in the subject and in the 
object. Philosophy is just the attempt of the reason to 
realize the co-ordination of the different aspects of experi- 
ence, and thereby to express, as far as may be, the nature 
of the total fact. But Ritschl's procedure amounts in effect 
to an invitation to do without philosophy altogether — to 
leave the apparent conclusions of science and the ethico- 
religious interpretation of the world standing side by side, 
with no criticism of either and no attempt at mediation or 
co-ordination. Such a dualism is essentially a surrender to 
scepticism, and is therefore a seed of weakness in the 
Ritschlian theology. Man cannot find rest by balancing him- 
self in this fashion first upon one leg and then upon another. 
But the dualistic position is entirely in keeping with the spirit 
of the period in which it took its rise. It was ebb-tide in 
philosophy, regarded as a synthetic doctrine. There was 
a widespread distrust of philosophical constructions, engen- 
dered by the excesses of speculative idealism, more particu- 
larly in the field of the * Philosophy of Nature \ At the 
same time, the concentration of the best energies of the 
time on the special work of science and on historical re- 
search encouraged a ' positive ' or anti-metaphysical habit 
of mind ; and popular philosophy of the negative variety was 
already exploiting in a materialistic interest the conclusions 



58 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

to which the scientific data seemed to point. The salvage 
of religious belief from this encroaching tide is the interest 
both of Lotze and of Ritschl. But immensely subtle and 
suggestive as is their work, both are fatally hampered by 
the subjectivity of their theory of knowledge, which they 
accepted from Kant with adaptations of their own, and 
which results in the unsatisfactory blend of Idealism and 
Agnosticism that has just been considered. 

Popularly, though inaccurately, described as * the con- 
flict between science and religion ', the opposition of which 
Lotze speaks figured largely in the theological and anti- 
theological literature of the century, and drew from Herbert 
Spencer a few years later (1862) the opening chapters of 
the First Principles in which, with the best of intentions 
but with a certain fatuity, he presented his doctrine of the 
Unknowable as offering ' the terms of a real and permanent 
peace ' between the combatants. 'If Religion and Science 
are to be reconciled, the reconciliation must be this deepest, 
widest and most certain of all facts — that the Power which 
the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.' * ' A 
permanent peace will be reached when Science becomes 
fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and rela- 
tive, while Religion becomes fully convinced that the mys- 
tery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.' 2 As Mr. 
Balfour wittily puts it : ' His method is a simple one. . . . 
He divides the verities which have to be believed into those 
which relate to the Knowable and those which relate to 
the Unknowable. What is knowable he appropriates, 
without exception, for science, what is unknowable he 
abandons, without reserve, to religion. . . . The one pos- 
sesses all that can be known, the other all that seems worth 
knowing. With so equal a partition of the spoils both 
combatants should be content.' 3 Spencer's doctrine of the 

1 First Principles, chap, ii, p. 46. 2 Ibid., chap, v, p. 107. 

8 Foundations of Belief, 1st ed., p. 285. 






in SPENCER'S UNKNOWABLE 59 

relativity of knowledge and the unknowableness of reality 
was, of course, a direct descendant of the Kantian opposi- 
tion between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself ; and 
the reconciliation bears a certain resemblance to the corre- 
sponding contrast in Kant between knowledge and belief. 
But in Spencer's case the object of belief is something to 
which we are to * refrain from assigning any attributes what- 
ever V We shall not be able to avoid ' representing it to 
ourselves in some form of thought ' ; and ' we shall not err 
in doing this ', he quaintly says, ' so long as we treat every 
notion we thus frame as merely a symbol, utterly without 
resemblance to that for which it stands.' The words which 
I have italicized were withdrawn, it is fair to say, in 1900, 
their author having apparently by that time come to realize 
the reductio ad absurdum which they involve. 

Mr. Balfour's own philosophical work is one of the most 
characteristic products of the conflict we have been con- 
sidering. It offers as clear an example as could be desired 
of the tendency to seek an escape from the conclusions of 
Naturalism, either in a purely sceptical position or, at all 
events, by a line of argument which limits and disparages 
the function of reason in experience. In the Defence of 
Philosophic Doubt, published in 1879 at tne ver y flood-tide 
of naturalistic confidence, Mr. Balfour turned his sceptical 
batteries upon the reputed foundation of the naturalistic 
creed in the certainties of sense-perception. His conclusion 
is, that the ordinary scientific beliefs about the material 
world, which we all share, are not based upon reason but 
thrust on us by the practical needs of life. No doubt the 
concatenation of the parts is brought about by the exercise 
of reason, but ' the system as a whole is incapable of rational 
defence \ 2 It cannot, therefore, set itself up as a standard 
to which religious beliefs must conform. ' Religion is at 

1 First Principles, chap, v, p. 109. 

2 Defence of Philosophic Doubt, p. 315. 



60 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

any rate no worse off than science in the matter of proof,' 
and therefore we have as much right to believe the one as 
the other, if so inclined. The state of matters may, in fact, 
be described in his own words thus : ' I and an indefinite 
number of other persons, if we contemplate religion and 
science as unproved systems of belief standing side by side, 
feel a practical need for both. . . . But as no legitimate 
argument can be founded on the mere existence of this 
need or impulse, so no legitimate argument can be founded 
on any differences which psychological analysis may detect 
between different cases of its manifestation. We are in 
this matter, unfortunately, altogether outside the sphere of 
Reason.' * In such a passage, and in others like it, we have 
obviously a formulation of the purest scepticism, for 
a parallel to which we have to go back to Hume — the 
Hume of the Treatise. Hume also, like Mr. Balfour, seeks 
to reduce belief to ' a kind of inward inclination or im- 
pulse ' — ' a strong propensity ' is his favourite phrase — and 
he consistently substitutes for logical grounds of belief the 
psychological causes which bring it about. A more dan- 
gerous defence of religious beliefs it would be difficult, I 
think, to imagine ; it surrenders all claim to rational criticism 
of the dogmas offered for acceptance, and supplies, accord- 
ingly, no safeguard against the re-invasion of the grossest 
superstition. 

There is much more that is constructive in the later 
volume on The Foundations of Belief. It contains, for 
example, the significant argument for Theism ' from the 

1 Defence of Philosophic Doubt, pp. 319-20 (italics mine). Cf. pp. 
316-17 : ' What constitute the " claims on our belief " which I assert to 
be possessed alike by Science and Theology? . . . Whatever they may 
be, they are not rational grounds of conviction. ... It would be more 
proper to describe them as a kind of inward inclination or impulse, 
falling far short of — I should perhaps rather say, altogether differing in 
kind from — philosophic certitude, leaving the reason therefore unsatis- 
fied, but amounting nevertheless to a practical cause of belief, from the 
effects of which we do not even desire to be released/ 



in MR. BALFOUR'S ARGUMENT 61 

mere fact that we know, a fact which like every other has 
to be accounted for '. If the general system of scientific 
beliefs is to be accepted as rational — which is the conten- 
tion of Naturalism and also the assumption of common- 
sense — it must be because ' we bring to the study of the 
world the presupposition that it is the work of a rational 
Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same time made 
us, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it.' l 
I have pointed out elsewhere 2 the affinities of Mr. Balfour's 
procedure here with Kant's central argument in the first 
Critique from the possibility of experience, especially when 
that argument is amplified by Kant at the close, by 
reference to the regulative function of the Ideas of Pure 
Reason, so that, even in the theoretical sphere, as he points 
out, reason teaches us to regard reality as intelligible in 
all its parts, and therefore as if it were the product of 
a supreme Reason. And, like Kant, having postulated ' a 
rational God in the interests of science ', Mr. Balfour goes 
on to postulate * a moral God in the interests of morality '. 3 
The argument from ' needs ' to their satisfaction — presented 
in the Defence of Philosophic Doubt so sceptically that we 
find the terms ' need ' and ' impulse ' used at times as 
equivalent 4 — is here deepened so as to be substantially 
identical with the principle of value. The author recognizes 
also the caution with which the argument requires to be 
applied. ' Whether this correspondence be best described 
as that which obtains between a " need " and its " satis- 
faction ",' he says, ' may be open to question. But, at all 
events, let it be understood that if the relation described is, 
on the one side, something different from that between a 
premiss and its conclusion, so, on the other, it is intended 

1 Foundations of Belief, pp. 296, 301. 

2 Man's Place in the Cosmos, 2nd ed., pp. 159-213, 'Mr. Balfour and 
his Critics.' 

s Foundations of Belief, p. 323. 

* e. g. in the passage already quoted on p. 60. 



62 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

to be equally remote from that between a desire and its 
fulfilment. . . . For the correspondence postulated is not 
between the fleeting fancies of the individual and the 
immutable verities of an unseen world, but between these 
characteristics of our nature which we recognize as that in 
us which, though not necessarily the strongest, is the 
highest; which, though not always the most universal, is 
nevertheless the best.' x 

It is a pity that so much that is sound and valuable 
should be associated with an elaborate argument in dis- 
paragement of reason and an exaltation of authority which 
seems to introduce again that unhappy disruption of our 
nature which is philosophically so dangerous an expedient. 
It turns out on a closer scrutiny that Mr. Balfour uses 
* reason ' in the old English sense of reasoning, or the proc- 
ess of conscious logical ratiocination; and it does not require 
any argument to convince us that the vast majority of 
human beliefs — including certainly our ethical, social, and 
religious beliefs — have not been reached by such a process. 
They have been generated in the individual, as Mr. Balfour 
says, by * custom, education, public opinion, the contagious 
convictions of countrymen, family, party, or Church \ But 
it is to court misapprehension when he proceeds to sum up 
these various forces under the term Authority, and to ex- 
press his meaning (which every one surely would accept) in 
the form of an elaborate contrast between Authority and 
Reason as operative forces in human belief and action. This 
use of the term authority is, if I may say so, itself without 
authority in current English usage, and if we do take it in 
Mr. Balfour's sense to cover causes such as those enumerated 
above — custom, education, public opinion, and so forth — the 
radical opposition between authority and reason at once dis- 
appears. The contrast is really between the private, con- 
sciously acting reason of the individual and the historic rea- 
1 Foundations, pp. 247-8. 



in APPEAL TO THE NON-RATIONAL 63 

son in which is summed up the experience of the race. The 
advance of speculative thought since Kant has largely con- 
sisted in surmounting the abstract and unhistoric individual- 
ism of preceding philosophy, which we find also in Kant 
himself, and bringing home to us the larger or corporate rea- 
son, active in history and embodied in the social structure. 
The term reason cannot, in short, be identified with the 
logical intellect without a grave departure even from ordi- 
nary usage. Mr. Balfour himself adopts the larger sense 
involuntarily from time to time in other passages of his 
book, as when he speaks of Reason as * the roof and crown 
of things V or of Naturalism as deposing ' Reason from its 
ancient position as the Ground of all existence \ 2 And if it 
is a deviation from ordinary usage so to restrict the term, 
the disparagement of reason also sounds strangely in the 
mouth of a thinker. ' I express myself with caution,' 
said Bishop Butler in a similar connexion, ' lest I should be 
mistaken to vilify reason, which is indeed the only faculty 
we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even 
revelation itself \ 3 The august name of reason is, in a sense, 
the symbol of the unity of our nature as intelligences, and 
the appeal to the non-rational soon leads us into strange 
company and to strange conclusions. 

This is well exemplified in another volume characteristic 
of the trend of thought towards the close of the century. 
Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution, published in 1894, a year be- 
fore Mr. Balfour's book, takes reason and rational in a sim- 
ilar narrow sense. Dealing with its ethical and social action, 
Mr. Kidd identifies reason with the principle of the baldest 
self-interest, and treats it, therefore, as essentially a divisive 
and disintegrative force, reaching finally the monstrous con- 
clusion that reason is ' the most profoundly individualistic, 
anti-social, and anti-evolutionary of all human qualities '. 
Naturally, therefore, he is bound to have recourse to what 
1 p. 72. 2 p. 75. 3 Analogy, Part I, chap. iii. 



64 IDEALISM AND NATURALISM lect. 

he calls ' ultra-rational sanctions ' to explain the possibility 
of social cohesion and social evolution. It is the chief func- 
tion of religion, he says, to supply such sanctions. Reli- 
gion, on the basis of these definitions, is essentially in antag- 
onism to reason. ' A rational religion is a scientific 
impossibility/ ' the essential element in all religious beliefs ' 
being ' the w//nz-rational sanction which they provide for 
social conduct V In reactionary circles the attack on reason, 
and the stress laid on religion as the only bond of cohesion 
in human society, were equally welcome. In France, 
especially, where an anti-religious scientific dogmatism had 
been peculiarly pretentious and aggressive, the ideas of 
Mr. Kidd and Mr. Balfour had a great reception from 
Brunetiere and other literary leaders. Extravagant prom- 
ises had been held out in the name of science — promises 
impossible of fulfilment — and Brunetiere's phrase, ' the 
bankruptcy of science,' was primarily intended to signalize 
the failure of a materialistically interpreted science to fulfil 
its own programme as moral and social guide of humanity. 
But the controversial phrase gained wide currency and was 
given a more extended application. The bigotry of negation 
led by revulsion to a temper of mind which was ready to 
discredit reason as such, and to seek a refuge in the uncriti- 
cized simplicities of faith. As might have been expected 
from the terms in which the controversy was stated, the 
whole movement tended to be exploited in the interests of 
clericalism and reaction. Such is the danger to which the 
assailant of reason inevitably exposes himself. 

I have dwelt in the latter part of this lecture on the 
tendency to slip into an anti-intellectualistic, and even irra- 
tionalistic, mode of statement in expressing the principle of 
value, and we have considered some historical instances of 
this tendency in the course of the sixty years' controversy. 
I have done so because I believe that this is to endanger 
1 Social Evolution, chap, v, p. 109. 



in TRUE ANSWER TO NATURALISM 65 

the principle itself, which is true only when taken as inherent 
in our experience as a whole. A house divided against itself 
cannot stand, and if value is set in opposition to reason, it 
must inevitably appear as a subjective and arbitrary judge- 
ment. Hence the mere assertion of the principle is not 
enough; it must be articulated as far as possible into a 
coherent system of reality, and shown to represent the 
ultimate insight of a larger knowledge. The only ultimately 
satisfactory answer to Naturalism is a philosophical con- 
struction of reality which can stand on its own merits. Such 
a constructive theory should be able to show that Naturalism 
is essentially the substantiation of a fragment which can 
exist only as an element in a larger whole. In other words 
the reassertion of human values becomes effective and con- 
vincing only when it is accompanied by a demonstration that 
the naturalistic conclusions rest on a misinterpretation of 
the nature of the scientific theories on which they are based. 
That this is so I hope to illustrate in the next lecture from 
the advance of science itself. 



LECTURE IV 
THE LIBERATING INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY 

The advance of science itself, and the continued reflec- 
tion of scientific men upon their own principles and methods, 
has been powerfully instrumental within the last quarter 
of a century in relieving us from the naturalistic incubus. 
This result has been brought about in two ways — in the 
first instance, by a truer view of the function of scientific 
conceptions and the meaning of scientific laws; in the second 
place, by the advance of scientific knowledge itself, more 
especially, so far as our present purpose is concerned, by 
the development of biology as a separate science. In the 
present lecture it is upon the second point that I wish to 
dwell, upon the new insights gained from biological science, 
and their influence in emancipating us from the bad dream 
of Naturalism. The last half-century has been pre-emi- 
nently the age of biology. There has been, of course, a 
continued advance (in many ways marvellous and latterly 
even revolutionary) of physical and chemical science. But 
biology, since the immense impetus given to it by Darwin, 
has undoubtedly stood in the forefront of human interest. 
It has exercised a more important influence than any other 
branch of knowledge in shaping our general conception of 
nature and man. And it is not too much to say that we are 
only now — or let us say, within the last twenty years — 
beginning to enter, as philosophers, into the full results of 
the biologist's labours. 

In this connexion the indissoluble relation of philosophy 
to the advance of scientific knowledge and the progress of 
social experience is still constantly misconceived. Philosoph- 
ical theory is still treated in many quarters as an arbitrary 



iv PHILOSOPHY AND EXPERIENCE 67 

speculation of the individual thinker, a flight of the imagina- 
tion into a transcendent void, in which the control of facts 
is entirely left behind. But there is an often-quoted meta- 
phor of Hegel's — who is usually deemed the most flagrant 
example of this masterful transcendent way of thinking — 
which might have sufficed to dissipate such misconceptions. 
' The owl of Minerva does not start upon her flight till the 
evening twilight has begun to fall.' ' It is only when the 
actual world has reached its full fruition that the ideal rises 
to confront the reality, and builds up, in the shape of an 
intellectual realm, that same world grasped in its substantial 
being.' * Philosophy is, and can be, nothing more than the 
critical interpretation of human experience; and in that 
experience the systems of knowledge represented by the 
different sciences have obviously an important part. 
Philosophy is, in reference to them, a criticism of the cate- 
gories or principles on which they proceed. 

This criticism, it is important to note, is not an abstract 
criticism undertaken by the philosopher ab extra, according 
to a priori or self-invented canons of his own. To such a 
conception of the philosopher's attitude and pretensions is 
largely due the suspicion with which the average man of 
science regards the interference of the ' metaphysician \ 
And it need not be denied that philosophers in the past have 
often given ground for such jealousy. But philosophical 
criticism is simply the thinking out and setting in a clear 
light of the conceptions and methods which science actually 
employs. To be fruitful, such an analysis must be the joint 
outcome of the intimate acquaintance of the scientific spe- 
cialist with his own range of facts and problems, and of the 
discipline in abstract thought and the comprehensive survey 
of experience which we mean by philosophy. The work 
would be best done by the man of science turned philosopher ; 

1 Werke, vol. viii, pp. 20-1, at the close of the Preface to the Philoso- 
phie des Rechts. 



68 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

and although that type is too rare, it is happily not non- 
existent. In any case, the best work of the kind is impossible 
until scientific workers have themselves begun to reflect 
upon the principles of their own procedure — upon the char- 
acteristic modes of behaviour which they investigate, and 
the nature of the conceptions by which they instinctively 
interpret them. Such reflection may easily result in con- 
flicting theories ; still of tener, from lack of acquaintance with 
the counters of thought and their past history and associa- 
tions, it may fail to reach a just expression of what it really 
intends to convey. But, on its basis, the philosopher proper 
may then profitably take up the work and attempt to carry 
the matter to a conclusion, lending his aid to set the points 
at issue in their true light by comparison with other fields 
of experience, and using the skill derived from his own 
special training to suggest an accurate and well-considered 
statement. 

It is some time before a science reaches this stage of 
reflection. In living contact with his subject-matter, the 
scientific worker learns instinctively to appreciate its char- 
acteristic qualities and modes of behaviour, and develops 
appropriate methods of handling it. But if he sets out to 
formulate either, he will in all likelihood employ, to express 
himself, the fossilized metaphysics of common sense or the 
ready-to-hand terms of some other science. In the case of 
biology, it was natural that the prestige of physics and the 
more recent advances of chemistry should lead, in the first 
instance, to the view that the processes which the biologist 
studies in the organism are only very complex examples of 
the mechanical and chemical processes which are observable 
in non-living bodies, and that the ideal of explanation in 
biology must therefore be a resolution of the biological fact 
into simple mechanical relations and movements of which, 
on this view, it is the combined result. Such a statement 
was supposed to be an analysis of the fact into its ultimate 



iv BIOLOGY AND PHYSICS 69 

terms, and in that sense to be an explanation of it. The 
universal claim made for this mode of explanation is strik- 
ingly exemplified, as we have seen, in the Kantian philoso- 
phy. The world of science is identified by Kant with the 
sphere of applied mathematics, the Newtonian scheme of 
acting and reacting particles ; and the world of science is 
conterminous with the realm of the knowable. But just be- 
cause he limited the term knowledge in this way, Kant was 
obliged, in order to include the other aspects of experience, 
to eke out knowledge by subjective principles of reflective 
judgement and by ethical faith, bequeathing to philosophy 
an arbitrary and ultimately unjustifiable dualism between 
knowledge and belief. The great biological advance belongs 
to the century between us and Kant, and we should expect 
accordingly to find in the science and philosophy of to-day 
a more adequate interpretation of the characteristic attri- 
butes of life than is offered in the Kantian theory. On the 
whole, this expectation is not disappointed. The mechanistic 
tradition is still strong, among ' the old guard ' of physiolo- 
gists, but among the more thoughtful biologists of a younger 
generation, a steadily increasing number of voices is heard 
pleading for ' the autonomy of life \ The last series of 
Gifford Lectures delivered in this University by Professor 
Driesch, on the ' Science and Philosophy of the Organism ', 
sufficiently attests the prominence of this question at the 
present time. There are many strands in M. Bergson's 
philosophy, and, as a metaphysical theory of the universe, 
it must be judged by ultimate philosophical considerations. 
But undoubtedly the most striking feature of his thought is 
the extent to which it is determined by the biological way 
of looking at things. The intimate appreciation of living 
experience forms the basis of the whole Weltanschauung 
which he offers us. His philosophy connects itself, there- 
fore, directly with the biological revolt against the reduction 
of reality to the interplay of physical constants. 



70 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

There was a further reason why biology did not at first 
come to its own — why the specific features of life were for 
long not frankly recognized in biological theory. When the 
great advance began, physiology had only recently emerged 
from a victorious campaign against Vitalism. What was 
then known as Vitalism consisted in the assertion of a ' vital 
force ' or ' vital principle ', conceived as supplementing the 
physical and chemical energies of the organism and direct- 
ing them in the service of the living whole. If one may 
judge from the polemic against it, this vital force was con- 
ceived after the fashion of an occult quality or ' metaphysi- 
cal ' entity, such as Comte denounced and of which Moliere's 
virtus dormitiva is the classical caricature. It was invoked 
to explain those features of the life-processes which the 
physical and chemical forces in operation seemed insufficient 
to account for; and it was itself conceived as a force on the 
same level — an independent source of energy, interfering in 
a more or less arbitrary fashion with the otherwise mechani- 
cally determined course of intra-organic events. Evidently, 
recourse to such an entity for purposes of explanation is 
scientifically as illegitimate as an appeal to the miraculous 
interposition of the Deity by way of explaining some partic- 
ular physical event. Both explanations amount to an en- 
couragement of intellectual indolence, inasmuch as they 
seem to absolve us from further research into the natural 
causation of the phenomenon in question. Whether the 
biological facts can be wholly resolved into physical and 
chemical facts or not, it is plainly the duty of the scientific 
investigator to press that acknowledged mode of explana- 
tion in all directions, to pursue it as his ideal even though it 
should prove a flying goal. 1 In fact, as Dr. J. S. Haldane 

1 As Kant says, ' It is infinitely important for Reason not to let slip 
the mechanism of nature in its products, and in their explanation not to 
pass it by; because without it no insight into the nature of things can 
be attained. . . . We should explain all products and occurrences in na- 
ture, even the most purposive, by mechanism as far as is in our power. 



iv THE OLDER VITALISM 71 

puts it, * vital force was useless as a means of explaining 
phenomena or suggesting definite paths of investigation, and 
was even blocking further progress. The mechanistic the- 
ory, on the other hand, suggested at every point clear and 
intelligible working hypotheses for further investigation.' * 
Accordingly, during the greater part of last century the 
acknowledged working hypotheses of nearly all physiologists 
and biologists were of a mechanistic order. Biology, as 
a consequence, if not actually incorporated with physics, 
presented, at all events from the wider point of view of 
philosophy, the appearance of a vassal state. The frontiers 
of mechanism were thus thrust forward to the very confines 
of the physical or conscious, which, in turn, came in 
many quarters to be looked upon as the inert accom- 
paniment or appendage of a series of strictly mechanical 
transformations. 

But the concentrated biological research of the last fifty 
years, while it has immensely extended our knowledge of 
the mechanics and the chemistry of organic processes, has 
strikingly failed to substantiate the mechanistic hypothesis 
from which most of the researchers started. Instead of 
coming nearer, the reduction of biological processes to terms 
of mechanism appears to recede, as knowledge deepens and 
becomes more intimate; and the recognition of this has 
led within the last twenty or thirty years to a significant 
revival of ' neo-vitalistic ' theories among the younger 
generation of botanists and zoologists. Professing to reject 
the old idea of ' vital force ' as an additional force or entity 
acting on the same plane as the physical and chemical forces, 

But at the same time [he adds significantly] , we are not to lose sight of the 
fact that those things which we cannot even state for investigation except 
under the concept of a purpose of Reason, must, in conformity with the 
essential constitution of our Reason, and notwithstanding those me- 
chanical causes, be subordinated by us finally to causality in accord- 
ance with purposes.' Critique of Judgment, section 78 (Bernard's 
translation, pp. 326, 333). 

1 Life and Mechanism, Two Lectures (1906), p. 5. 



J2 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

these neo-vitalists yet insist, not only that there are features 
of organic process which are wholly inexplicable from the 
point of view of pure mechanism, but that no vital process 
whatever, however simple and, at first sight, purely physical 
it may seem, admits of adequate statement in merely 
physical terms. They claim, therefore, that biology must 
stand alongside of physics as an ' autonomous ' science, 
which has a right to use its own terms — the only appropriate 
terms or categories — to describe the facts with which it 
deals. 1 

Outstanding phenomena constantly referred to as forcing 
us beyond the mechanical point of view are such as the 
restitution of lost or injured parts, seen on a small scale in 
the healing of any wound, but more strikingly exemplified 
in many of the lower animals. If a newt's hand is ampu- 
tated, the stump of the limb grows a new hand to make good 
the mutilation and thus restore the vital functions of the 
creature to their normal condition. Similarly, the Tubu- 
laria, a kind of sea-anemone, re-grows its flower-like head. 
Moreover, as Driesch points out, ' you may cut the stem at 
whatever level you like; a certain length of stem will always 
restore the new head by the co-operation of its parts '. 2 So 
again, the elaborate embryological experiments of Driesch 
and others have shown that disturbances of the normal 
development of the egg, and the removal at an early stage 
of parts normally destined to develop into certain parts of 
the adult organism, may take place, and that a typically 
complete embryo will still be developed. Similarly in 
organisms of a low type, if the creature is cut in two, the 

1 One of Driesch's books is entitled Biologic als selbstdndige Wissen- 
schaft, and the same idea explains the title of Professor J. Arthur 
Thomson's two articles in the Hibbert Journal (October 191 1 and Janu- 
ary 1912), 'Is there One Science of Nature?' Cf. the same writer's 
Introduction to Science, p. 163; Evolution, p. 231; also Karl Pearson, 
Grammar of Science, chap, ix, ' Life ', section 6. 

2 Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. i, p. 127. 



iv FEATURES OF LIVING ACTION 73 

separated segments will, in some cases, complete themselves 
as independent animals. Thus we are met everywhere by 
the idea of the whole. Such phenomena are only peculiarly 
striking examples of the fundamental characteristic of every 
living thing. The organism is a self-conserving system, 
building itself up by appropriating from its environment 
suitable material, which it transforms into its own tissue; 
responding continuously to changes in its surroundings by 
adaptive processes, which it is observed to vary repeatedly, 
should the first effort prove unsuccessful in achieving its 
end; and, finally, regulating in the minutest and most 
delicate fashion the action of each of its parts in the interest 
of the whole. 

It is perhaps the last-mentioned feature of organic proc- 
esses — their regulation or co-ordination in the interest of 
the living whole — that has been most conclusively established 
by the progress of research. ' It is only quite recently ', says 
Dr. Haldane, ' that we have come to realize the astounding 
fineness with which the kidneys, respiratory centres, and 
other parts regulate the composition of the blood.' * It is 
the same with the regulation of the production and loss of 
heat which maintains the temperature of the body approxi- 
mately constant. To state it generally, processes of absorp- 
tion and secretion which might easily seem at first sight to 
proceed entirely on a physical level — and which were, in 
fact, long treated by physiologists as mere mechanical proc- 
esses of filtration and diffusion — reveal themselves on closer 
analysis as selective in character and controlled throughout 
in the interest of the individual organism as a whole. And 
the same is true of reflex action conceived as an immediate 
and definitely determined response to a sensory stimulus. 
This is the ideal and the basis of the mechanical explanation 
of life in the hands of Loeb and others. But the tropisms 
and the phenomena of ' taxis ' on which Loeb lays so much 
1 Mechanism, Life and Personality, p. 49. 



74 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

stress have been shown by Jennings to be ' not simple and 
immediate processes of orientation at all ' but the final re- 
sult of many different single performances on the part of 
the animal. They are not the direct result of physico- 
chemical attraction, but are reached, in the main, by the 
method of trial and error. 1 Similarly in the vertebrates the 
spinal reflexes, often taken as types of the pure reflex, are 
shown to be ' determined by all that happened and is happen- 
ing in other parts of the moving body '. 2 As Dr. Haldane 
points out, ' if we examine a reflex such as that of assuming 
a normal position or removing an irritant, it soon appears 
that it is by no means the simple mechanical response which 
it may at first sight be taken to be. The physical response 
varies endlessly according to circumstances. It is the end 
attained, and not the physical response, which is simple and 
definite \ 3 We cannot therefore treat any reflex action as 
an isolated phenomenon; its independence is only relative, 
and instead of the behaviour of the organism being re- 
solvable into a combination of such elementary mechanisms, 
these actions appear more truly from the biological point of 
view as themselves ' secondarily automatic ' in character, 
that is to say, as arrangements fixed by habit and inheritance 
in the service of the living creature as a whole, and never 
completely withdrawn from central control. 

The fact is, that in the organism we are face to face for 
the first time with the real individual 4 whose nature is ' to 

1 Cf. Loeb's essay on ' The Mechanistic Conception of Life ' ; Jennings, 
Behaviour of Lower Organisms, p. 252; Driesch, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 19. 

2 Driesch, vol. ii, p. 33. 

8 Life and Mechanism, p. 41. 

4 Such a statement is not affected by the fact that, even in the realm 
of life, what we regard as an individual may be said to depend on the 
context of our interests. To the physiologist, expounding the minute 
structure of the body and the functions of its parts, the unit may be the 
cell; but to the ordinary man, and to the physiologist himself outside of 
his professional work, the natural unit is the living creature as a whole. 
The unity of a complex organism is supra-individual with reference to 
the society of co-operating cells of which it is composed. But that does 



iv A SELF-MAINTAINING WHOLE 75 

maintain and reproduce in the face of varying environment 
its structure and activities as a whole V This may be 
said to be the fundamental assumption of biology. Bi- 
ology deals, not with transformations of matter and energy, 
but with the relations of organisms and their environment. 
Of course, the physical laws hold good throughout; it is 
easy, for example, to measure the amount of energy gained 
or lost in the course of vital activities. But the commerce 
of the organism and its environment can only be understood 
in terms of teleology or purpose. The organism is a self- 
conserving system which acts as a whole, and none of the 
actions of its parts can be fully or naturally understood 
except as the determinate function of such a system. 
1 Life ', I urged more than twenty years ago, ' is the presup- 
position of physiology, the fact on which its existence is 
based, a fact which it has simply to accept, as all the other 
sciences have to accept their own presuppositions. Its ex- 
planations move within the fact of life, and cannot be used to 
explain that fact itself, or in other words to explain it away. 
Yet that is in substance what a purely mechanical physiology 
tries to do.' 2 It is only, I would add, because he so instinc- 
tively assumes this in practice that, when he begins to reflect, 
the physiologist is in danger of failing to notice his own 
assumption and of leaving it out of his theory. Terms like 
stimulus, response, behaviour, all imply the notion of selec- 
tion, the power of adaptation to environmental change, by 
which the organism maintains and develops its own charac- 
teristic being. All this seems to be involved in the notion 

not mean that the unity of the organism is less individual than that of 
its component cells. Its real individuality, translated into terms of 
feeling, is matter of direct experience to each of us in our own case, and 
we cannot doubt that this is an intenser and more perfect individuality 
than that of the minor individuals on which it is based, but which ft 
seems almost to absorb. 

1 Life and Mechanism, p. 43. 

2 Man's Place in the Cosmos, 2nd ed., pp. 76-8, in an essay on ' The 
" New " Psychology and Automatism '. 



76 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

of a real individual. Physics knows no self-maintaining in- 
dividuals — only a continuous transmutation of energy. It 
is fundamentally misleading to swamp the organism in its 
environment — to treat the living being simply as a network 
of pathways through which the energy of external nature 
takes its course, soaks in and oozes out again. We are 
misled by physical phrases like currents of energy and paths 
of least resistance. Such phrases seem to imply that what 
takes place is precisely the same as the selection of a channel 
by a rill of water trickling down a hill-side. But this is not 
a true account even of the humblest organism. Nerve 
currents cannot be treated in this isolated fashion, as if 
they took place in vacuo or in an indifferent medium; they 
take place in a living individual, and apart from the unity of 
that individual, they are mere abstractions. A nerve-current 
means, originally and normally, central stimulation and ap- 
propriate central reaction ; and neither the appreciation of 
the stimulus nor the nature of the response can be under- 
stood apart from the organism as a self-maintaining whole. 
Purposiveness, in short, is the very notion on which physi- 
ology is built, and it is worked into the whole theory of 
development. 1 Yet it is a notion entirely alien to the blind 
vis a tergo of mechanism as such. The more clearly, there- 
fore, a physiologist realizes what pure mechanism means, 
and the more fully he grasps the import of the processes with 
which he himself habitually deals, the more ready will be 
his acknowledgement that they belong to a different order 
of facts. As it was put in the passage already quoted from 
Kant, the phenomena in question are such as ' we cannot 
even state for investigation except under the concept of 

1 Dr. Haldane very properly points out that, whatever stress the 
theory of evolution may lay on natural selection as a mechanically act- 
ing cause, natural selection could not act unless we assumed that each 
organism actively maintains and reproduces its particular structure and 
activities. Natural selection is thus a cause operating only within the 
presuppositions of life, within a world of living creatures. 



iv NEO-VITALISM 77 

a purpose of Reason V ' A self-stoking, self-repairing, 
self-preservative, self-adjusting, self-increasing, self-repro- 
ducing machine ' 2 is only by an abuse of language spoken of 
as a machine at all. 

I do not wish to be understood as committing myself to 
any of the current statements of what is called ' Neo- 
Vitalism \ Most of the writers thus referred to are careful 
to disclaim the implications which brought discredit on the 
older Vitalism, and they seek to avoid its phraseology. I 
am not sure, however, that they always succeed. It is cer- 
tain, at any rate, that they are more successful as critics of 
the mechanistic theory than in the precise statement of their 
own position. Even the most recent theories, such as 
Driesch's elaborate theory of Entelechies or Psychoids and 
Reinke's theory of Dominants, seem to lapse into statements 
which perilously resemble the older doctrine which they 
repudiate. Thus Professor Driesch begins by telling us 
that ' entelechy is not a kind of energy ', ' it lacks all the 
characteristics of quantity ', ' it is order of relation and noth- 
ing else \ 3 But he constantly speaks of it as an agent. 4 " 
The ' psychoid or entelechy uses the conductive and specific 
faculties of the brain as a piano-player uses the piano ' 
(ii. 97). Hence, although he refuses to speak of 'psycho- 
physical ' interaction (seeing that he refuses to attribute 

1 So again, in a passage perhaps more frequently quoted : ' Absolutely 
no human Reason . . . can hope to understand the production of even 
a blade of grass by mere mechanical causes. As regards the possibility 
of such an object, the teleological connection of causes and effects is 
quite indispensable for the Judgment, even for studying it by the clue of 
experience.' Critique of Judgment, section jj ad fin em ( Bernard, p. 326) . 

2 I take this array of terms from Professor J. Arthur Thomson, who also 
points out that, in the common comparison of the organism to a machine, 
we forget that the latter is no ordinary sample of the inorganic world. 
1 It has inside of it a human thought' (Hibbert Journal, vol. x, p. 121). 

3 Vol. ii, p. 169. 

4 Entelechy, in. a stricter sense, he says, is 'the natural agent which 
forms the body ' ; the psychoid is ' the elemental agent which directs it ' 
(vol. ii, p. 82). And again (p. 238), entelechy is 'a well-established 
elemental agent '. 



78 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

psychical characteristics to the psychoid), he recognizes 
' interactions between physico-chemical and non-physico- 
chemical agents of nature ' (ii. 1 17). ' Entelechy is affected 
by and acts upon spatial causality, as if it came out of an 
ultra-spatial dimension ; it does not act in space, it acts into 
space; it is not in space, it only has points of manifestation 
in space ' (ii. 235). In order to reconcile this action with the 
physical theory of energy, he explains that its function must 
be purely regulative. Entelechy possesses, he says, the 
power to suspend reactions which would otherwise take place 
(thus converting kinetic into potential energy), and the 
power subsequently to release the energy thus stored, and 
permit ' the mechanical-energetical events to continue their 
course from the point where it was broken' (ii. 221). 
Entelechy, however, cannot transform every kind of poten- 
tial energy into the kinetic forms; for that would mean 
removing the obstacle which had hitherto impeded the trans- 
formation, and ' that would require energy '. But for sus- 
pending a reaction and subsequently relaxing that suspen- 
sion, he tells us, ' no transfer of energy is required, but 
simply a transformation of energy from actuality into a 
potential form and vice versa ' . Entelechy is thus (as he puts 
it in a headline) ' burdened with as little as possible ', but 
' this faculty of a temporary suspension of inorganic be- 
coming is the most essential ontological characteristic of en- 
telechy ' (ii. 180-5). He refers several times in illustration 
to Clerk Maxwell's well-known fiction, and concludes, ' the 
work of Clerk Maxwell's " demons " is here regarded as 
actually accomplished' (ii. 225). 

Now the objection to this whole mode of statement is the 
same as to the older Vitalism. It treats life or entelechy 
essentially on the physical level, as an additional force act- 
ing ab extra upon a set of physical and chemical forces 
which, apart from this interference, are conceived as going 
by themselves. So Driesch speaks, as we have seen, of ' the 



iv DEFECTIVE STATEMENTS 79 

mechanical-energetical events continuing their course ', as 
soon as the momentary interference of entelechy is at an 
end ; apart from this ' temporary suspension ', he appears to 
regard the processes that take place in the organism as sim- 
ply ' inorganic happening \ It seems to me fundamentally 
wrong to insert life in this fashion into a system otherwise 
regarded as purely mechanical, and then to seek to apologize 
for the intrusion by reducing its action to a minimum — 
' burdening entelechy with as little as possible \ Once em- 
barked on such calculations, I confess I fail to see why, if 
expenditure of energy is involved in removing the obstacle 
which, in ordinary cases, prevents the transformation of 
potential into kinetic energy, no expenditure should be in- 
volved in the operations of suspension and subsequent re- 
lease. From the physical point of view, suspension must 
surely mean the interposition of some obstacle, and release 
must mean its removal. This seems to me, accordingly, no 
true vindication of ' the autonomy of life \ The autonomy 
of life, or the independence of biology, means, as I interpret 
it, that physical and chemical categories are superseded 
throughout — that we must pass to another range of con- 
ceptions altogether, if we wish to describe accurately the 
behaviour of anything that lives. Strictly speaking, there 
is no ' inorganic happening ' in a living creature. We may, 
of course, by the ordinary method of scientific abstraction, 
isolate different aspects of what happens, and usefully study 
organic processes, at one time from a purely physical, at an- 
other time from a chemical, point of view. But such ac- 
counts do not represent anything independently real, as if we 
had a set of facts into which life enters and which it proceeds 
to manipulate. The organism as ' an autonomous active 
whole ', every function in which is centrally or organically 
determined, is the only conception which suffices to describe 
the biological facts ; and however mechanistic a physiologist 
may be when he is working at the details of specific move- 



80 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

ments and connexions, he will be found recurring instinc- 
tively and unavoidably to this fundamental conception as 
soon as he begins to speak of the physiological fact as a whole 
in its proper nature, and to discuss, for example, the funda- 
mental phenomena of assimilation, growth, and reproduc- 
tion. 1 

I have not the training, nor would this be the place, to 
pursue this discussion into further technical detail. My 
purpose is simply to emphasize the significance of the bio- 
logical demand for more adequate categories. The biolo- 
gist's claim of ' autonomy ' is just the assertion of his right 
to take the facts as he finds them, instead of forcing them 
into the Procrustes bed of a preconceived theory. By ex- 

1 Driesch's italicized description of entelechy as not acting in space 
but ' into space ', ' as if it came out of an ultra-spatial dimension ', might 
be taken, perhaps, as no more than an assertion of the fact that the 
organism as such overcomes or rises above the purely spatial relations 
of physical science. Just so far as the organism is a real whole, and its 
parts members one of another, to that extent these parts cannot be treated 
as mutually external facts interacting in space, and the causality of the 
whole cannot be treated as the combined result of these separate actions. 
Driesch describes the ' ultra-spatial ' action of entelechy as constituting 
' the very essence of vitalism, of non-materialism '. But he does not 
maintain himself at this level of thought; and to seek to explain the 
fundamental characteristic of living action by referring it to the causality 
of a separate agent is, in reality, a failure to rise above the mechanical 
point of view. And we do not escape from the ingrained materialism of 
ordinary thought by the easy (but, as history shows, completely ineffec- 
tive) device of calling our agents and entities ' immaterial '. 

Reinke's ' dominants ', so far as I am acquainted with his theory, seem 
to resemble Driesch's entelechies or psychoids. He means by the term, 
he says, ' those secondary forces in the organism whose existence we are 
forced to recognize, but which we cannot further analyse . . . that prin- 
ciple of control which sways whatever energies are available, just as 
men use tools or machines '. The term is used in the plural simply be- 
cause the manifestations of control are manifold; and he tells us that 
the term has been devised ' to provide a short explanatory description of 
certain essential processes ', not as implying ' a troop of ghosts with 
which I have peopled the cells and organs of animals and plants '. But 
in his treatment of the ' dominants ' as ' forces ', and in his designation 
of them as secondary forces (Krdfte zweiter Hand), whose function is 
to control and guide the ' primary ' forces of which physics and chem- 
istry give an account, his theory seems open to the same objections as 
that of Driesch. 



iv NEW PERSPECTIVES 81 

hibiting the insufficiency of the purely mechanical theory 
which was the inherited assumption of the science in the 
middle of last century, the progress of biological reflection 
has helped, to that extent, to dissipate the apprehensions 
caused by the apparent inclusion of living beings — man be- 
ing no exception — within a completely determined system 
of physical necessity. For, undoubtedly, the first impres- 
sion produced by the theory of evolution in its Darwinian 
form (with exclusive or almost exclusive stress on natural 
selection as its explaining cause) was that of a universal 
levelling-down, man linked by his genealogy with the lowest 
forms of animal life, from which, by slow and insensible 
gradations, his physical and mental faculties had been de- 
veloped, the rudimentary forms of life itself being but com- 
plex specifications of inorganic molecules. The result 
seemed to be the victory of materialism all along the line. 
It is not astonishing, therefore, that Darwinism, as having 
apparently supplied the most fatal weapon against the higher 
view of man's place in the universe — as claiming, so to 
speak, to complete the materialistic proof — should have been 
at first an object of terror and obloquy to the average the- 
ological mind of the generation which witnessed its rise. 
And this general impression was not likely to be removed by 
the facile Berkeleian or Humian sensationalism with which 
Huxley sought to evade an explicitly materialistic conclu- 
sion, by Lange's hardly less unsatisfactory Kantianism, or 
by the agnosticism, derived impartially from Kant and 
Hume, to which the scientific thinkers of the day relegated 
all the final questions of philosophic thought. 

One thing at least the sequel should teach us — the faith- 
lessness and the foolishness of despairing as to the future of 
the instincts and beliefs which constitute man's higher na- 
ture. These are indeed imperishable, the supreme example of 
that power of self-maintenance and of adaptation to chang- 
ing circumstance which, science teaches us, is the character- 



82 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

istic of all that lives. Changes in our conception of nature 
may be fatal to one formulation after another; accidents of 
expression may drop away in deference to historical criti- 
cism, nay, much that seemed of the very essence of religious 
faith may have to be left behind. But each time that the 
earthly body of a belief is laid in the dust, it receives a more 
glorious spiritual body, in which it continues to function as 
of old in the heart of man. Timid theologians who trem- 
ble for the ark of God at every advance of scientific knowl- 
edge do but repeat the sacrilege of Uzzah in the sacred 
legend, smitten by the anger of heaven for his officious inter- 
ference. Faith, which is an active belief in the reality of 
the ideal, is the very breath by which humanity lives, and it 
will reconstitute itself afresh as long as the race endures. 

And it is significant how little we can forecast the course 
of new ideas, the ultimate forms they will assume, and the 
nature of the influence they are eventually destined to exer- 
cise on our world-view. Thus the doctrine of evolution 
seemed at first, as we have seen, to thrust man ruthlessly 
back into the lower circles of nature and to make for an all- 
engulfing materialism. But, in another perspective, the proc- 
ess of evolution as a whole, with man as its crowning prod- 
uct, may be held to reintroduce into nature, on a grander 
scale and in a more tangible form, the idea of end or aim 
which the theory of natural selection had done its best to 
banish from the details of her procedure. Although the end 
is achieved, according to the theory, by purely mechanical 
means, and is the end, therefore, only in the sense of being 
the last term, the successive steps in any process may always 
be regarded teleologically as means towards the final achieve- 
ment ; and so Darwin may be taken as replacing man in the 
position from which he was ousted by Copernicus. Man 
appears, according to the doctrine of evolution, so inter- 
preted, as the goal and crown of nature's long upward 
effort. The evolution of ever higher forms of life, and 



iv DARWIN RE-INTERPRETED 83 

ultimately of intelligence, appears as the event to which the 
whole creation moves ; and, accordingly, man is once more, 
as in pre-Copernican days, set in the heart of the world, 
somehow centrally involved in any attempt to explain it. 
The mere concentration of men's minds upon the biological 
history tended to discount the influence of the astronomical 
outlook in dwarfing man's importance. And, after all, the 
evolution of life may take place similarly on innumerable 
other planetary worlds where the conditions permit; the 
point is the central importance of the living and sentient 
as compared with its inorganic environment. The very 
term environment indicates a subsidiary function, and the 
usage is characteristic of the biological point of view. 

So again, what presented itself to the earlier evolutionists 
as the naturalizing of man appears to a later generation 
rather as a humanizing of nature, in view of the continuity 
of the process by which the higher emerges from the lower. 
We all remember Professor Huxley's denunciation of ' the 
cosmic process ', his poignant insistence on the sheer breach 
between ethical man and pre-human nature, insomuch that 
he represented ' the ethical process ' on which society de- 
pends as essentially a reversal of the cosmic process at every 
step. ' In place of ruthless self-assertion, it demands self- 
restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down all 
competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely 
respect, but shall help, his fellows/ As regards pre-human 
animal nature, Professor Huxley held, in fact, what he him- 
self characterizes as ' the gladiatorial theory of existence ' ; 
and this is admittedly impossible to harmonize with any 
ethical ideal hitherto known among men. This gladiatorial 
theory is itself a reflection of the omnipresent struggle for 
existence which so exclusively dominates the picture of na- 
ture given us by Darwin and his immediate successors. To 
this vivid idea, indeed, suggested to Darwin by his reading 
of Malthus, and reflecting, as Professor Geddes and others 



84 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

have pointed out, the keen competitive conditions of an in- 
dustrial age, we owe the whole theory of natural selection. 
But later biologists have greatly modified the original Dar- 
winian conception. It seems certain that natural selection 
is only one cause among several that determine the course of 
evolution. And animate nature, as these writers remind us, 
presents other aspects than that of a relentless struggle for 
a scanty subsistence. It has its aspects of bountiful plenty 
and of peaceful happiness. But, above all, animal life is 
not expressible in terms of the economics of modern com- 
mercialism. Its foundations are laid, as Professor Arthur 
Thomson says, on the facts of sex and parenthood. In the 
attraction of mate for mate and in the care of offspring, as 
well as in the further facts of association and co-operation 
in flocks and herds, we can see prefigured the altruistic vir- 
tues which form the staple of our human morality. 1 The 
exclusive individualism of the early evolutionists was in 
some measure due to the economic doctrines and practice of 
their age. But it is to be noted that, even if we look only 
at the struggle for existence itself, that struggle takes place 
not only or chiefly between individuals, but in its intensest 
form between different societies; and in that struggle the 
qualities which make for social efficiency are those which are 
most important, and which are furthered therefore by the 
principle of natural selection. We may expect, accordingly, 
as Karl Pearson says, that ' Science will ultimately balance 
the individualistic and socialistic tendencies in evolution bet- 
ter than Haeckel and Spencer seem to have done \ 2 Science 
has, in fact, already begun to do so, and it is an ironic re- 
flection that Nietzsche's apotheosis of the gladiatorial theory 
and the purely individualistic ideal was given to the world 
as the last word of biological science, just as the patient 

1 Cf . Geddes and Thomson's Evolution, p. 175; Kropotkin's Mutual 
Aid a Factor of Evolution; Pearson's Grammar of Science, chap, ix, 
sections 15 and 16. 

2 Grammar of Science, 1st ed., p. 435. 



iv LEARNING BY EXPERIENCE 85 

pioneers of that science were correcting that one-sided state- 
ment, and even abandoning natural selection itself as the 
sole principle of explanation. 

Biology, finally, with its fundamental conception of evo- 
lution, has emphasized the contrast between history, as the 
ground-character of the living being, and the cycles of 
merely physical change, conceived as a ceaseless weaving and 
unweaving, of which no memory or trace remains in the in- 
ner nature of the things which undergo it. In a sense, as 
Bergson suggestively points out, the world of physics is not 
in time at all ; real duration begins with life and that organic 
memory which shows itself in the formation of habits. 
Changes, for the living being, are experiences by which it 
learns, by which its very nature is moulded. All adaptation 
depends on this capacity of learning, and the capacity is ob- 
servable in living beings at a very low stage. Thus in the 
righting reactions of the star-fish, the initial movement of 
each single arm is determined in the first instance separately 
by external stimuli or immediate internal conditions. But as 
soon as the least result with regard to righting is reached, a 
unified impulse appears; the actions of the parts are co-ordi- 
nated, and single stimuli are disregarded. For a living being, 
therefore, the past lives on as a vital moment in the present. 
Its nature at any given moment resumes, as it were, its whole 
past history ; and its action in response to any given stimulus 
is determined not only by the present stimulus but, to an 
indefinitely greater extent, by its own accumulated past. 
We instinctively feel the term ' experience ' to be out of place 
where this plasticity, this capacity of learning, is conceived 
to be absent. On such experience depends the possibility of 
progress ; and whether the idea of progress can be applied in 
an ultimate reference or not, it is certainly the only idea 
which brings order and unity into our human world. Here 
again, therefore, biology, with its stress on the concrete 
reality of time, appears in the true line of advance. 



86 THE INFLUENCE OF BIOLOGY lect. 

There can, at least, be no doubt that the twentieth century 
opens with a very remarkable revival of general interest in 
philosophy; and, as I have tried to show, it is not the least 
hopeful sign of this movement that the impulse has come 
not so much from the professional philosophers as from men 
of science, in virtue of insights reached and problems raised 
in the progress of scientific thought. There is, doubtless, as 
always where a movement spreads to wider circles, much 
crude statement and wild theorizing by philosophically un- 
instructed writers. But there is a hopefulness even in the 
determination expressed in so many quarters to be done 
with academic tradition, and to discuss the universe from 
its foundations entirely without prejudice. There is a new 
spirit abroad in the philosophical world, a freshness of out- 
look, a contagious fervour, a sense of expectancy, which 
have long been absent from philosophical writing. The 
greater part of the nineteenth century was, philosophically, 
a period of reaction and criticism, an age great in science 
and in history, but suspicious of philosophy, distrustful of 
her syntheses, too occupied for the most part with its own 
concrete work to feel the need of them, and otherwise prone 
to take refuge in positivism or agnosticism. The philosophy 
of the century was in these circumstances mostly in a minor 
key, critical and historical rather than creative, reviewing 
its own past and demonstrating the necessity of its own 
existence, rather than directly essaying the construction of 
experience. But now it seems as if, with a century's accu- 
mulation of fresh material, philosophy were girding herself 
afresh for her synthetic task. 

I have tried in this lecture to trace the liberating influence 
of biology in helping to bring about this changed attitude 
of mind. The revolutionary discoveries in physics that have 
marked the turn of the century have also, I think, by the 
sense of new horizons which they have given us, powerfully 
helped to mature a more philosophical view of the nature 



iv A PHILOSOPHICAL REVIVAL 87 

and function of physical concepts and laws. In view of the 
sudden transformation which has overtaken the very ele- 
ments of the old physical scheme, there has been reborn the 
confidence that experience is richer than any of the formulae 
in which we may have sought to confine it. 

Nay come up hither. From this wave-washed mound 
Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ; 
Then reach on with thy thought till it be drowned. 
Miles and miles distant though the grey line be, 
And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, — 
Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea. 1 

1 D. G. Rossetti, sonnet 37, ' The Choice.' 



LECTURE V 
THE LOWER AND THE HIGHER NATURALISM 

The term Naturalism shares the ambiguity of the term 
nature, from which it is derived. A life ' according to 
nature ' meant to the Stoics that pious citizenship of the 
universe — the life of human brotherhood and cosmic piety — 
in which they saw the realization of the highest human 
ideal ; to the Cynics it meant casting off the restraints of law 
and custom, and even discarding the ordinary decencies of 
civilized humanity. ' Back to nature,' said the eighteenth- 
century sentimentalist, opposing nature to civilization, and 
glorifying the time ' when wild in woods the noble savage 
ran '. ' Back to nature,' cries Nietzsche, in his frenzied 
attack on all accepted morality and religion. ' Morality and 
religion belong entirely to the psychology of error,' ' every- 
thing good is instinct.' The task of the philosophical re- 
generator of the race is ' to translate man back again into 
nature — to make legible again upon the palimpsest the ter- 
rible original text, homo natura \ On the whole, it may be 
said, although the term need carry with it no such opposition 
or exclusion, that the tendency of usage is to take nature as 
equivalent to non-human or infra-human nature — the uni- 
verse of physical forces and of merely animal existence. 
Hence, with Nietzsche, to translate man back again into 
nature means to brand as a history of morbid degeneration 
the process of moralization by which the distinctively hu- 
man being has been created. So in art Naturalism means 
the accentuation of la bete humaine. And in philosophy, 
similarly, Naturalism has come to mean the type of theory 
which so emphasizes the continuity between man and the 
non-human nature from which he springs as to minimize, if 



v MOTIVES OF NATURALISM 89 

not entirely to deny, any difference between them. It 
denies, at any rate, any central significance to human life in 
the play of the cosmic forces. 1 Consciousness is an inci- 
dent or accident of the universe, which does not throw any 
special illumination upon its ultimate nature. It arises and 
passes away; the physical basis of things remains. Natu- 
ralism is, in short, a larger, and, in some respects, a looser 
term for what used to be called materialism. 

This usage is general in the best authorities, and there is 
no reason to disturb it, seeing that it designates intelligibly 
one great trend of philosophical theory about the universe. 
But one can sympathize with the regretful protest of the late 
Professor Wallace against this degradation of an inherently 
honourable name. ' The faults of Naturalism ', he says, 2 
' spring from a creditable motive. It is the desire to be 
honest, to say only what you can prove, to require thorough 
consistency and continuity in the whole realm of accepted 
truths. . . . Naturalism was a reaction from the follies of 
supernaturalism.' Indeed, he continues, ' Naturalism was 
at the outset and in essence a negation not of the supernatu- 
ral in general, but of a supernatural conceived as incoherent, 
arbitrary, and chaotic ; a protest against a conception which 
separated God from the world as a potter from his clay, 
against the ignava ratio which took customary sequences as 
needing no explanation, and looked for special revelation 
from portents and wonders.' Hence, ' in its main conten- 
tion ', he concludes, ' Naturalism was sound ; and that con- 
tention is, as expressed in the old phrase, " Non fit saltus in 
natura." ... It is the faith of science — the human faith — 
that only on the hypothesis that " all's reason and all's law " 

1 So Renan, in his last phase, is reported to have said that he had 
attributed to man too central a part in the universe, and that the de- 
velopment of humanity might be of no more significance than a growth 
of moss or lichen. 

2 In an article on Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief in the Fort- 
nightly Review, April 1895, partly reproduced in his posthumous Lec- 
tures and Essays. 



90 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

shall we ever understand — as we can hope to understand — 
" this unintelligible world 'V 

There can be no doubt that these are the considerations 
to which Naturalism owes its vitality. It represents the 
victorious claim of the awakened intelligence to explain all 
events and existences by what are called natural causes — to 
view them, that is to say, as steps or phases in one orderly 
process of change — instead of having recourse at any point 
of difficulty to the direct ' interference ' of some meta- 
physical agent or to some theory of special creation. The- 
ology has itself, in great measure, abandoned the conception 
of a God who gives evidence of his existence chiefly by 
spasmodic interferences with the normal course of events 
— who lives, as it has been said, in the ' gaps ' of our scien- 
tific knowledge, and whose position, therefore, every con- 
quest of science renders more precarious. Such a conception 
has no place in philosophy, whose very idea is law or system. 
The continuity of nature's processes, so strongly insisted on 
by Naturalism, may, therefore, be regarded by a sympathetic 
critic as simply the most impressive form in which the gen- 
eral idea of law and orderly change presents itself to an 
age predominantly influenced by the natural sciences. But 
continuity is as much the interest of an enlightened philoso- 
phy as it can be of any scientific worker. It is, indeed, the 
working maxim or presupposition of every attempt to sys- 
tematize our knowledge. If, therefore, an idealistic philoso- 
phy takes exception to the naturalistic theory, it must be, 
not on account of its Naturalism in the sense just explained, 
but because ordinary Naturalism takes ' nature ' in an un- 
duly narrow sense, and is dominated, moreover, by an 
erroneous idea of explanation which leads to a denial of 
real differences or an attempt to explain them away. 

This constitutes what I may call the lower Naturalism. 
A charity like Professor Wallace's may condone its excesses 
as a reaction against the old theological idea of man as 



v LEVELLING DOWN 91 

thrust from a supernatural sphere into material surround- 
ings, which are, as it were, accidental to his real being; but 
its procedure is none the less fallacious, and its conclusions 
unfounded. The separation between man and nature may 
be the expression initially, as has been suggested, of a 
dualistic spiritualism or supernaturalism ; but the natural- 
istic denial of this separateness or foreignness tends, by 
way of reaction, to merge man altogether in that infra- 
human nature from which it declares him to be derived. 
Nature, however, is not the less nature because it exhibits 
a scale of qualitative differences. The principle of con- 
tinuity is misinterpreted, if it is supposed to necessitate 
the reduction of all nature's facts to the dead level of a 
single type. The higher Naturalism, as I venture to call 
it, feels no temptation to this levelling down; it does not 
hesitate to recognize differences where it sees them, without 
feeling that it is thereby creating an absolute chasm between 
one stage of nature's processes and another — a chasm 
which can only be cleared by supernatural assistance 
expressly invoked. And I wish to point out that this greater 
freedom of attitude is largely owing to its truer view of 
what is meant by explanation, and where and in what sense 
explanation is possible. 

The most fundamental differences in philosophical inter- 
pretation may be shown to depend on the view that is taken 
of the nature of explanation. Explanation, in its most gen- 
eral sense, means, for science, the statement of a fact in its 
simplest terms, so that it can be assimilated to other facts 
and included as a case of what we call a general law. 
In Professor Bain's words, f mystery means isolation \ 
We are said to ' understand ' a fact when we are able to 
regard it as a particular example of a mode of happen- 
ing already known to us. Explanation also means, in sci- 
entific usage, a statement of the conditions of the occur- 
rence of any fact. Such causal explanation, as it is often 



92 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

called, consists in the discovery of some antecedent set of 
circumstances on which the given phenomenon follows and 
on which it appears to depend. The typical attitude of the 
scientific investigator is, as Professor Lloyd Morgan puts 
it, 1 ' this retrospective outlook towards antecedent condi- 
tions,' the attempt to give the history of things, and, if pos- 
sible, to trace them back to their beginnings. Explanation 
in this sense is therefore essentially explanation of the later 
by the earlier, an interpretation, as Spencer puts it, of ' the 
more developed by the less developed '. But it is important 
to remember that such explanation professes to be in the 
end no more than a description, in as simple and general 
terms as possible, of the way in which things happen, or 
the characteristic ways in which reality behaves. These 
ultimate modes of behaviour have to be taken for granted, 
in the sense, for example, that the law of gravitation sum- 
marizes one whole range of phenomena, ' but no one knows 
why two ultimate particles influence each other's motion.' 2 
But if the ultimate modes of behaviour have thus simply 
to be accepted and described, a serious danger may lurk in 
this method of explaining facts exclusively by reference to 
their antecedents. The method may be unimpeachable in a 
science like mechanics or molar physics, where the facts with 
which we are dealing are all of the same order — transforma- 
tions of matter and motion. Here the present configuration 
of the facts may be treated without danger of misconception 
as the mathematical resultant of its antecedents. There is 
equivalence just because there is no real gain in the process; 
there is change, but no advance, nothing new. Everything 

1 In his little volume, The Interpretation of Nature, p. 9 

2 Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, p. 145 Hence, Du Bois-Rey- 
mond, in his essays emphasizing the limits of our knowledge of nature 
(Die Grenzen des Naturerkennens and Die sieben Weltrdthsel), treated 
the nature of matter and force as the first of the world-riddles before 
which the human mind is condemned to stand with the confession 
1 Ignoramus et Ignorabimus '. 



v THE MEANING OF EXPLANATION 93 

remains on the same level. But in the biological sciences, 
where the phenomenon of growth is fundamental, and in 
the region of the historical generally — wherever, in short, 
there is a real evolution — the question at once arises whether 
the ' retrospective ' method of explanation does not in- 
advertently omit from its account of causation the very 
feature which distinguishes this mode of change from the 
dead-level equivalences of physics. The method of inter- 
preting the more developed by the less developed is logically 
tantamount to a reduction of the more to the less, and, 
therefore, to a denial of the very fact to be explained. Or 
if the fact, as a phenomenon, is beyond dispute, it is still 
robbed of its significance by a method which simply refunds 
the later stage into the earlier, and equates the outcome of 
the process with its starting-point. This fallacy is plainly 
involved in the method, when we pass from one order of 
facts to another, say, from inorganic nature to the facts 
of life, or from animal sentience to the conceptual reason 
and self-consciousness of man. Both life and self-conscious- 
ness appear to emerge from antecedent conditions in which 
these distinctive qualities cannot be detected. But to 
insist on treating them as no more than the inorganic or 
non-rational phenomena which form their antecedents is 
not a legitimate explanation, in the genuine scientific sense of 
reducing a fact to simpler terms and thereby bringing it 
into line with other facts. The simplification is effected in 
this case by a process of abstraction which leaves out the 
characteristic features of the concrete fact supposed to be 
explained. It is by a progressive abstraction of this kind, 
and not by any real process of causal explanation, that we 
arrive at such a formula of the world-process as Spencer's 
re-distribution of matter and motion, and imagine ourselves 
obliged to look on the moving particles of physical science 
as the ultimate reality out of which all other phenomena 
are woven by cunning complication. 



94 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

This fallacious method of explanation has been very 
strongly pressed, as we have seen, in the case of life. In 
the sixties and seventies of last century, controversy raged 
round the question of the origin of life from the non-living, 
and then and later the ideal of the majority of physiologists 
was the expression of organic processes in physico-chemical 
terms. The extreme unwillingness to recognize in vital 
phenomena a range of facts with distinctive characteristics 
of their own must be traced to the idea that such acknowl- 
edgement would constitute a breach in the continuity of 
nature — would be equivalent, in fact, to the admission of 
special metaphysical causation ab extra, to account for the 
specific characteristics of the facts. And, to be sure, ill- 
advised theologians found great comfort in the apparent 
* gap ', which, they urged, manifestly necessitated an act of 
' special creation '. The appearance of this deus ex machina 
increased the suspicion of the Naturalists; and to this must 
be added the difficulty of stating what has been called 
the vitalistic hypothesis in terms which shall not seem 
to imply an extraneously-acting directive force. But with 
the growth of a calmer temper the irreducible difference 
between vital and merely physical or merely chemical 
facts has, as we saw in the preceding lecture, more and 
more impressed itself upon unprejudiced observers. Per- 
haps the most striking example of the recognition of this 
difference is to be found in the chapter on 'The Dynamic 
Element in Life \ added by Spencer himself in 1898 to the 
revised edition of his Principles of Biology, and containing 
the frank acknowledgement that ' the processes which go 
on in living things are incomprehensible as results of any 
physical actions known to us. . . . We are obliged to con- 
fess that Life in its essence cannot be conceived in physico- 
chemical terms.' 

This transition in nature from one order of facts to 
another had already been stated by Mill quite simply in 



V ' CREATIVE SYNTHESIS ' 95 

a chapter of his Logic, 1 without any fuss or mystery about 
it; and it is indeed a fact which stares us in the face and 
forms the basis of the hierarchy of the sciences. It has, 
however, an important philosophical bearing, and the idea 
of ' creative synthesis ', as it has not inaptly been called, 
has played a considerable part in recent discussion. The 
biological term ' epigenesis ' has also been generalized to 
express the same idea of the origin, through synthesis, of 
features of experience which are essentially new. 2 Such 
results of synthesis occur not only at points which mark the 
transition from one science to another ; they are exemplified 
in such simple experiences as melody and harmony resulting 
from the combination of musical notes. So Browning finely 
celebrates the musician's power as lying in this : 

That out of three sounds he frames, not a fourth sound, 
but a star. 

1 Book III, chap, vi, ' On the Composition of Causes.' ' All organized 
bodies are composed of parts similar to those composing inorganic 
nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state ; 
but the phenomena of life which result from the juxtaposition of these 
parts in a certain manner bear no analogy to any of the effects which 
would be produced by the action of the component substances considered 
as mere physical agents.' Hence each science possesses a relative inde- 
pendence in respect of the peculiar nature of the phenomena with which 
it deals : ' The Laws of Life will never be deducible from the mere 
laws of the ingredients, but the prodigiously complex Facts of Life 
may all be deducible from comparatively simple laws of life.' 

2 Epigenesis or creative synthesis in the sense indicated does not neces- 
sarily imply, so far as I can see, the pluralism and contingency with 
which Professor Ward identifies, or at least associates, it. (Cf. The 
Realm of Ends, pp. 98 and 270 : ' To the pluralist the so-called evolu- 
tion of the world is really epigenesis, creative synthesis; it implies 
continual new beginnings, the result of the mutual conflict and co-opera- 
tion of agents, all of whom, though in varying degrees, act spontaneously 
or freely.' 'Here all is history, the result of effort, trial and error; 
here we have adventure and ultimate achievement.') Pluralism, so 
understood, may, no doubt, be more easily worked into a theory of 
epigenesis than into the opposite theory of preformation, with which, 
indeed, it is flatly irreconcilable. But the idea of epigenesis itself, it 
seems to me, would be equally applicable to the process of experience, 
if that process were conceived as the progressive self-revelation of an 
absolute being. The use of the term does not, therefore, decide the 
issue which Pluralism raises. 






96 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

And if the appearance of life is the most impressive instance 
of a synthesis which refuses to be analysed into its apparent 
antecedents, yet men of science, fighting for the idea of the 
continuity of nature against the theological doctrine of 
special creation, were not altogether wrong in the stress 
they laid on the phenomenon of crystallization as similarly 
inexplicable — if that is the right word to employ in either 
case — by the unguided forces of gravity and cohesion. 
There are, of course, important differences between the 
two cases, and there is the further difference that matter 
is constantly passing from a non-crystalline to a crystalline 
structure, and the experimenter can easily bring about the 
transition by arranging appropriate conditions, whereas, in 
the case of life, no instance can be shown in nature of 
the production of the living from the non-living, and the 
problem has hitherto equally baffled the experimenter. 
In the early days of Darwinism, the more enthusiastic 
spirits believed that they were on the eve of obtaining, if 
they had not already obtained, evidence of such transition. 
But it was a case of the wish being father to the thought, 
and more careful analysis has always left things just where 
they were. The attempt to ' catch nature half -in and half- 
out ', as Hutchison Stirling graphically put it, has invari- 
ably failed, and the question of abiogenesis has latterly 
fallen into the background. 1 I cannot myself believe that 
it is of any philosophical importance. The philosophical 
question is the difference of nature between the two orders 
of fact, not the question of historical emergence — how or 
when the one arose from the other or came to be added to 
it. Even if we were able to show a debatable land between 
the organic and the inorganic, as we can between the animal 
and the vegetable kingdoms, and to point to objects which 
might be classed almost indifferently as the one or the 

1 Although it was revived by Professor (Sir Edward) Schafer in his 
presidential address to the British Association in 1912. 



v QUESTIONS OF ORIGIN 97 

other, even then the existence of such intermediate or transi- 
tional forms would not obscure the fact that we do pass to 
a new plane or level of existence, qualitatively different and, 
through that difference, opening up a new range of possi- 
bilities to the creatures which it includes. 

Philosophy is not interested, therefore, in speculations 
like those of Lord Kelvin as to the origin of life upon our 
globe from germs carried to it by meteorites from other 
parts of space. This slightly grotesque hypothesis would 
at best only throw the difficulty a little farther back; and, 
after all, if we are not to think in quite primitive terms of 
a creator, at some point in the history of this globe or of 
other globes, manufacturing the first cells, as it were with 
hands, what other view can we take, so long as we think 
in terms of time-sequence, than that somewhere and at 
some time, under a convergence of appropriate conditions, 
life supervened upon a hitherto inorganic nature? But 
the fact that science finds absolute origination an insoluble 
problem in every department of investigation should at 
least suggest to us as philosophers that there must be 
something wrong with this whole method of attacking the 
subject. To the great philosophers this aspect of time- 
succession has seemed in the main irrelevant. In the well- 
worn phrase, philosophy contemplates the world sub quadam 
specie aetemitatis. There may be a sense in which to do 
this is to avert one's gaze from the concrete world and to 
embrace an abstraction in its stead. But in its present 
application the phrase means that what philosophy primarily 
seeks to exhibit is the character or essential structure of the 
universe, and that that character can only be held to be given 
when we keep in view the whole range of its manifestations, 
and relate these manifestations to one another according 
to their intrinsic nature — which may prove to be also 
a relation according to a scale of value or worth. But the 
intrinsic nature and the value of any phase are not altered 



98 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

in the least by its appearance sooner or later in a particular 
time-series; and therefore the latter question is strictly 
indifferent to philosophy, which is interested in the phase 
simply as a revelation, so far forth, of the real nature of 
the world, and thus an element helping to determine the 
final answer which it seeks. 

We need have no difficulty, therefore, in agreeing with 
Professor Lloyd Morgan 1 when he repudiates as unphilo- 
sophical the idea of ' a supernatural hiatus between the 
inorganic and the organic ', and combats the conception of 
Vital Force as ' something outside the recognized course 
of nature ', introduced to bridge this particular chasm and 
account for the peculiarities of the new order of phenomena. 
But if Vitalism means simply that ' living matter has cer- 
tain distinctive properties'; if we use the term vital in 
a descriptive rather than a causal sense to denote a pecu- 
liarity of behaviour ' which is found nowhere else in nature ', 
and which we cannot assert is ' anywhere foreshadowed in 
the inorganic sphere ', then no objection, he allows, can be 
taken to the term. But in principle, he urges, the term Vital 
Force is, in that case, on the same footing as gravitative 
force, chemical force, crystalline force and similar terms; 
for ' no one has yet been able to show how certain observed 
modes of attraction can be developed out of others. . . . 
A candid and impartial inquiry into the facts enables us 
to realize that under these or those assignable conditions 
new modes of attraction supervene — modes which with 
our present knowledge no one could have foretold, since in 
science it must not infrequently suffice to be wise after the 
event.' Hence, he concludes, we must generalize our 
position, and if we speak of ' forces ' in connexion with these 
different groups of phenomena, they must all alike be 
regarded, not as implying at any point what has been called 

1 In his articles on ' Biology and Metaphysics ' and ' Vitalism ' in 
The Monist, vol. ix (January and July 1899). 






v IMMANENCE AND CONTINUITY 99 

1 an alien influx into nature ', but as ' differential modes 
of manifestation of the self-existent Cause \ 

Professor Lloyd Morgan expresses his conclusions much 
in the same terms as Spencer (to whose new chapter in the 
Principles of Biology he refers), and one might easily crit- 
icize his conception of the relation of science and meta- 
physics as dealing respectively with ' the realities of experi- 
ence ' and ' the sphere of noumenal existence \ His 
phraseology is also occasionally grudging in its seeming 
unwillingness to recognize the relatively greater step from 
the non-living to the living than from any one phase of in- 
organic nature to another. But, in principle, I take his con- 
tention to be sound on the two points of immanence and 
continuity. The argument which he presents from the 
scientific side is, indeed, essentially the same as that pre- 
sented from the metaphysical side by Professor Bosanquet 
in his recent volume of Gifford Lectures. In his chapter on 
* The Bodily Basis of Mind ', Professor Bosanquet does not 
hesitate to apply the same principle to the perhaps still more 
crucial case of the appearance of consciousness and the gen- 
esis of souls. ' We may smile ', he says, ' at the simplicity of 
the materialist who could explain consciousness as an effect 
of material combination ' ; yet it is important ' to empha- 
size the idea of a being essentially connected with or even 
founded upon its environment (past as well as present), to 
which, nevertheless, or out of which, it brings a principle of 
unity. . . . Instead of a self-subsistent eternal angelic being, 
we should thus be led to conceive of the soul as — to adapt 
a phrase of Lotze — a perfection granted by the Absolute 
according to general laws, upon certain complex occasions 
and arrangements of externality. . . . And we must bear in 
mind that, in the end, this being granted by the Absolute 
upon a certain combination is all that any connexion, any 
form of causation or inherence can mean.' In such a view, 
he claims, ' there is nothing whatever materialistic or 



ioo LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

unspiritual,' since ' in apparent cosmic development, whether 
inorganic, organic, or logical, the rule is for the stream to 
rise higher than its source V 

Let me take one more example of what I mean by the 
transition from one order of facts to another, or from one 
plane of experience to another — the passage from the merely 
animal life of semi-passive perception and association to 
the distinctively human level of the active conceptual 
reason. ' The having of general ideas ', says Locke in a well- 
known passage, ' is that which puts a perfect distinction 
betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the 
faculties of brutes do by no means attain to.' 2 This is just 
the kind of passage which the average evolutionist with 
a negative bias in his thinking is apt to set down as a piece 
of antiquated theological prejudice. If evolution has proved 
anything, has it not proved that there is no such qualitative 
distinction between human reason and the lower ranges 
of animal intelligence? The whole thing is a question of 
degree — of advance by insensible gradations, with nowhere 
any hint of a difference in kind. So, in familiar accents, 
one can hear the indignant protest. And yet how absolutely 
true to the facts is Locke's honest report. He is talking, 
in the same context, of the comparison of our ideas one 
with another, and this is what he says : ' How far brutes 
partake in this faculty is not easy to determine. I imagine 
they have it not in any great degree : for though they 
probably have several ideas distinct enough, yet it seems 
to me to be the prerogative of human understanding, when 
it has sufficiently distinguished any ideas, so as to perceive 
them to be perfectly different, . . . to cast about and consider 
in what circumstances they are capable to be compared, and 
therefore, I think, beasts compare not their ideas further 
than some sensible circumstances annexed to the objects 

1 Individuality and Value, pp. 189-91. 

2 Essay, II. 11. 10. 



v PLANES OF EXPERIENCE 101 

themselves. The other power of comparing, which may be 
observed in men, belonging to general ideas, and useful 
only to abstract reasonings, we may probably conjecture 
beasts have not.' * An animal, that is to say, perceives 
objects, and of course it is aware of differences between the 
objects it perceives: it distinguishes one object from 
another. But the whole process is semi-passive; the 
differences impress themselves upon the mind as upon 
some sensitive plate. Differences and resemblances between 
objects are sensed or felt as part of the total unanalysed 
perception of the objects. The feeling of the differences or 
resemblances is sufficient to determine the animal's action 
this way or that ; but it does not drive him, as it may drive 
a man, ' to cast about ', as Locke says, ' and consider in 
what circumstances ' the objects differ from or resemble one 
another. By this deliberate active comparison we define 
to ourselves the precise points of agreement or difference — 
we isolate them from the general context of the objects as 
sensed or perceived — we frame, in fact, a concept, a general 
or abstract idea. In this power of abstraction or, as we 
now more commonly say, in the conceptual reason — in the 
grasping by the mind of an idea which does not exist as an 
object of sense at all — Locke rightly saw the differentia of 
human intelligence, and he was also right in connecting 
with it the use of words as general signs. 

Apply this to the idea of causal connexion which lies at 
the basis of our scientific knowledge. Hume explains this 
idea as a habit of expectation generated by the repeated 
sequence of two events in the past. Now that is exactly 
the length we may suppose the animal mind to go — auto- 
matic association of two events through their repeated 
conjunction in the past — and you can guide a whole life 
by the habits of expectation thus generated. And yet the 
animal does not possess the idea of cause in the strict sense 

MI. ii. 5. 



102 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

at all — the general idea of connectedness or the dependence 
of one event upon another. To realize that idea is to form 
the first conception of an independent world — an inde- 
pendent system of definitely connected facts. It contains 
in itself all the potentialities of science; and the birth of 
reason in the individual, if we may so speak, is just the 
moment when repeated conjunctions suggest to the mind 
this idea of the connectedness, the interdependence, of the 
two phenomena. To the mind that remains on the animal 
plane, frequent repetition produces a firm association 
between two facts, firm habits of expectation; but if the 
customary sequence should be interfered with, if expecta- 
tion should be baulked, that will mean only a feeling of 
discomfort; and if such disappointments occur frequently, 
the automatically generated habit of expectation will as 
automatically tend to disappear. To the incipient human 
intelligence, on the contrary — to the mind that has once 
grasped the general idea of causal dependence — the non- 
occurrence of an expected effect sets the mind at once ac- 
tively to work, to find out the reason of the non-occurrence, 
to find out what counteracting cause has been present to 
defeat expectation in this particular case. Obviously these 
two minds move on quite different levels. 

But here again there is no need to entangle ourselves in 
the vexed question as to where precisely association ends 
and reason begins — as to whether there may not be instances 
of conscious process in the lower animals which deserve 
the name of reason in the full sense. The animal mind and 
the human mind, as I have used the terms, are to be taken 
as types, ideal stages of mental development. Nor need 
one minimize in the least the continuity of the process by 
which the one seems to pass, almost at a touch, into the 
other. But it is a case of 'the little more and how much 
it is, and the little less and what worlds away '. To cross 
this ideal line means to reach the notion of objectivity and 



v CONTINUITY AND ' BREAKS ' 103 

truth on which science is built; it means morality, art 
and religion, and all the possibilities of human history. 
Can anything be more futile, then, than to ignore the 
qualitative distinction between the one range of mind and 
the other? When the dog develops a system of astronomy 
or the cow pauses on the hill-top to admire the view, we 
shall gladly welcome them to the logician's company of 
' rational animals ' ; but, till then, the wise man will be 
content to recognize a difference which is real. 

Continuity of process and the emergence of real differ- 
ences — these are, in short, the twin aspects of the cosmic his- 
tory, and it is essential to clear thinking that the one be not 
allowed to obscure the other. And whereas, formerly, the 
magnitude of the differences led to static or typical con- 
ceptions of separate species and (as in our last instance 
of the human and animal mind) to the assertion of a 
sheer discontinuity between the one stage and the other, so 
more recently the evolutional study of intervening forms 
and the accumulation of minute differences has made us 
realize so vividly the extremely gradual steps by which 
nature engineers her advances that, as Professor Ward puts 
it, ' we are inclined to imagine either that there is no problem 
at all, or that, if there is, the problem is solved V Or in 
the words of Hume, which he aptly impresses into his 
service, ' the passage is so smooth and easy that it produces 
little alteration in the mind. The thought glides along the 
succession with equal facility, as if it considered only one 
object, and therefore confounds the succession with the 
identity.' Continuity may be inconsistent with ' breaks ', 
if we define a ' break ' as a ' chasm ' or ' an alien influx into 
nature '. But if we take the facts as they stand, without 
importing a theory into the word, we may say with the 
late Professor Wallace that ' all development is by breaks 

1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, ist ed., vol. i, p. 260. 



104 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

and yet makes for continuity '- 1 But the word, so used, 
will mean simply the acknowledgement of what I have 
called the emergence of real differences in the course of 
the process — actual 'increments' or 'lifts' in the process, 
where quantity may be said to pass into quality, difference 
of degree into difference of kind. Such crises, as it has 
been well said, 2 are ' greater in their implications than in 
the actual moment'; they are points after which every- 
thing seems to ' move in a new dimension '. But it is 
neither necessary, nor is it possible, to fix such points as 
definite dates in an historical sequence. The very nature 
of time forbids the translation of philosophical analysis into 
literal history. 

It is instructive to note that all the * world-riddles ' of 
Du Bois-Reymond's once famous book, 3 or all at least after 
the first, concern the origin of the differences or increments 
which mark the successive steps of the evolutionary process. 
After the first incomprehensibility of the nature of matter 
and force 4 comes the origin of movement, then the origin 
of life and what appears to be purposive adaptation, then 
the origin of sentience, and finally the origin of rational con- 
sciousness and will. Each transition is one of the eternal 
' limits ' set to our knowledge of nature, in regard to which 
the confession of Science must be a perpetual ' Ignorabi- 
mus '. As he puts it in one of the instances, ' it is not merely 
the case that, in the present state of our knowledge, con- 
sciousness is inexplicable from its natural conditions, but in 



1 Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic, second edition, p. 476. ' The reader 
of the Divina Corn-media', Professor Wallace finely says, 'may hardly 
need to be reminded that, at each of the grander changes of scene and 
grade in his pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds himself without obvious 
means transported into a new region of experience. There are catas- 
trophes in the process of development: not unprepared, but summing up, 
as in a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived process of growth." 

2 Professor J. Y. Simpson's Spiritual Interpretation of Nature, p. 131. 
8 Die sieben Weltr'dthsel, published in 1880. 

4 Already referred to on p. 92. 



v TYNDALL'S BELFAST ADDRESS 105 

the nature of things it never can be explicable from these 
conditions.' Inexplicable, certainly, we might reply, from 
these conditions, if they are substantiated as self-existent in 
their purely physical aspect. Each new fact in turn must be 
sheerly unintelligible if we take our stand at the stage below, 
and if, in the last resort, we treat 4 the mechanics of the 
atom ' as the ultimately self-existing fact, out of which 
everything else is somehow to be conjured and so explained. 
And, in spite of his criticism of the atoms as philosophical 
fictions, Du Bois-Reymond is still dominated by the concep- 
tion of matter, defined by its purely physical qualities, as the 
independently real substructure of phenomena. 

It was this, too, that lent the sting to Tyndall's celebrated 
statement, in his Belfast Address of 1874, that he felt com- 
pelled by an intellectual necessity to discern in matter ' the 
promise and potency of all terrestrial Life '. When we look 
back upon the passage and read it in its context, with its 
quotations from Lucretius and Bruno — when we note the 
use of the vague term ' nature ', the reference to ' latent 
powers ', and the insistence on the continuity of nature as 
the chief point of the contention — the position appears 
neither so dangerous nor so unphilosophical as it did to 
those who first heard it. It appeared to them, in the con- 
troversial language of the day, ' material atheism ', because 
they understood by matter the matter of the physicist as a 
prior self-existing fact. And that is the danger and, one 
may still say, the falsity which lurks in Tyndall's way of 
putting the truth he intends. If we take matter in anything 
like its accepted meaning, then our attempted explanation 
breaks down at every successive stage in the evolutionary 
process; if, on the other hand, we endow matter with 
4 the promise and potency ' of all that eventually crowns 
the process, the word loses all definite meaning. Con- 
temporary critics did not fail to point out that Tyndall's 
matter, in virtue of the powers attributed to it, was really 



106 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

indistinguishable from spirit, or, as Coleridge said in a 
similar connexion, ' a something-nothing-everything which 
does all of which we know V It becomes, indeed, simply 
the notion of potentiality as such — perhaps the most 
slippery term in the whole vocabulary of philosophy. If 
it is the complete or final fact which we wish to explain, 
and if, as we have seen, explanation can only mean accu- 
rate description or analysis of the nature of the fact, it is 
clear that it can serve no useful purpose — it must, indeed, 
be fundamentally misleading — to say that characteristics 
which, according to the very meaning of the terms, are not 
exhibited by the atoms and molecules of the physicist, are 
potentially present in these particles as such. To insist in 
this way on regarding the later stages as existing pre- 
formed, so to speak, in the bare beginning is, as we have 
seen, to ignore the true nature of the evolution-process, as 
characterized by the emergence of real differences and the 
attainment of results which transcend the apparent starting- 
point. It is only in so far as we connect the physical with 
the vital and the conscious, as stages of a single process, 
that we can speak, with even a show of intelligibility, of the 
physical as containing the potentiality of all that is to follow. 
The philosophical meaning of potentiality is, in short, simply 
the insight that, in the interpretation of any process, it is 
the process as a whole that has to be considered, if we wish 
to know the nature of the reality revealed in it. In other 
words, every evolutionary process must be read in the light 
of its last term. This is the true meaning of the profound 
Aristotelian doctrine of the Telos or End as the ultimate 
principle of explanation. As I have put it on a previous 
occasion — ' All explanation of the higher by the lower 
is philosophically a hysteron-proteron. The antecedents 
assigned are not the causes of the consequents, for by 
antecedents the naturalistic theories mean the antecedents 

1 Biographia Literaria, chap. vii. 



V MEANING OF POTENTIALITY io? 

in abstraction from their consequents — the antecedents 
taken as they appear in themselves, or as we might suppose 
them to be if no such consequents had ever issued from 
them. So conceived, however, the antecedents (matter 
and energy, for example), have no real existence — they are 
mere entia rationis, abstract aspects of the one concrete 
fact which we call the universe. . . . All ultimate or philo- 
sophical explanation must look to the end. , . . If we are 
in earnest with the doctrine that the universe is one, we 
have to read back the nature of the latest consequent into 
the remotest antecedent. Only then is the one, in any true 
sense, the cause of the other.' x 

It is worth observing that the same apparently inveter- 
ate tendency to obliterate the distinctions between different 
ranges of experience ma}- be seen asserting itself afresh in 
the relation of biology to psychology and sociology. Just 
as the long-established ascendancy of physical science has 
hindered the recognition of the autonomy of the science 
of life, imposing upon the biologist a foreign ideal, as if 
physical conceptions alone were ultimately valid — their 
de facto inadequacy in dealing with vital phenomena being 
attributed not to the characteristics of the subject-matter 
but to the biologist's (so far) imperfect analysis — in a 
similar fashion the prestige of biology has led within recent 
years to the wholesale application of biological concep- 
tions and theories to the facts of mind and society. I do 
not wish to deny — I would, on the contrary, emphasize — 
the stimulus which psychology and sociology, as well as 
general philosophy, have derived from contact with the 
great biological movement of the last half-century. The 
biological analogies and metaphors are, in general, far more 
instructive than the physical conceptions which they re- 
placed, and the restatement has made many phases of 
mental development more intelligible. But here again 
1 Man's Place in the Cosmos, pp. 11-12. 



108 LOWER AND HIGHER NATURALISM lect. 

autonomy must be respected. Consciousness brings into 
view a new range of facts and values; and to suppose that 
biological categories can be more than suggestive analogies 
in the new sphere is once again to obliterate the distinctive 
characteristics of the facts which it is sought to describe. 
Loose talk about natural selection and the social organism 
will not solve the problems either of mental or of social 
science. A new order of facts demands its own conceptions 
in terms of which it may be described and systematized. 1 

From the philosophical point of view, therefore, explana- 
tion is essentially an affair of categories. Correct explana- 
tion depends in any department on the employment of 
appropriate categories, and philosophy consists in an in- 
sight into the relation of the categories in question and the 
realm of facts which they describe, to other categories and 
other realms or aspects of reality. We must have some 
notion of their significance in an account of the nature of 
the universe as a whole. The function of philosophy is, in 
this connexion, comparable to that of a ' Warden of the 
Marches ' between the various sciences, resisting the preten- 
sions of any particular science to be the exclusive exponent 
of reality and assigning to each its hierarchical rank in 
a complete scheme of knowledge. For if, as men of 
science tell us, scientific explanation is in the end descrip- 
tion, the same is ultimately true of philosophy itself. 
Philosophy, or perhaps I should qualify the statement 
and say, sane philosophy, is not really the quest of some 
transcendent reason why the nature of things is as it is; 
it does not attempt, in Lotze's phrase, to tell us ' how being 
is made '. ' All that can be asked of philosophy ', I ven- 
tured to say in my first volume, published more than 
thirty years ago, * is, by the help of the most complete 
analysis, to present a reasonable synthesis of the world as 

1 Cf. Ostwald, Natural Philosophy, p. 140 (English translation) ; 
Geddes and Thomson, Evolution, p. 231. 



v TRUE AND FALSE PHILOSOPHY 109 

we find it. The difference between a true and a false philos- 
ophy is that a false philosophy fixes its eye on a part only 
of the material submitted to it, and would explain the 
whole, therefore, by a principle which is adequate merely 
to one of its parts or stages; a true philosophy, on the 
other hand, is one which " sees life steadily and sees it 
whole " — whose principle, therefore, embraces in its evolu- 
tion every phase of the actual.' * 

1 The Development from Kant to Hegel, p. 66. 



LECTURE VI 
MAN AS ORGANIC TO THE WORLD 

It is as between human intelligence and its antecedent 
conditions that the idea of a chasm or absolute break is most 
deeply rooted, both in philosophy and in ordinary thought. 
A variety of causes have contributed to create and perpetu- 
ate the impression. But if we consistently apply in this 
case the twin principles of continuity and immanence, and 
steadily refuse to characterize the nature of the world till we 
have all the available facts before us, some of the most per- 
sistent difficulties of modern thought will be found, I think, 
to disappear. The nature of the power at work in any proc- 
ess, I urged in the preceding lecture, is only revealed in the 
process as a whole. It is revealed progressively in the 
different stages, but it cannot be fully and truly known till 
the final stage is reached, and it must inevitably lead to error 
if we substantiate any of the stages as something complete 
in itself and existing by itself. Now man — human knowl- 
edge and experience generally — is, from this point of view, 
the last term in the series, and the world is not complete 
without him. When I say the last term in the series, this 
does not involve any arrogant claim on man's part to * set 
himself ', in Locke's words, ' proudly at the top of all 
things ' ; in other mansions of the universe, as Locke 
quaintly puts it, ' there may be other and different intelligent 
beings, of whose faculties he has as little knowledge or ap- 
prehension as a worm shut up in one drawer of a cabinet 
hath of the senses or understanding of a man.' 1 Man him- 

1 Essay, II. 2. 3. It is probably an unconscious reminiscence of this 
passage, when Huxley says (in a more sceptical interest) that we may 
be set down in the midst of infinite varieties of existences which we are 
not competent so much as to conceive — ' with no more notion of what is 



vi THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE- in 

self, as we know him, assuredly represents, as the poet says, 
the dawn and not the day. 1 Yet, whatever heights beyond 
heights may open above us, intelligence is in principle one, 
and it is the emergence of intelligence, that is to say, of be- 
ings with powers of knowledge and appreciation and self- 
determination, which supplies the final term, the goal or 
consummation of the evolutionary process. It is not, in 
short, with man specifically, as the historical denizen of this 
planet, that we have to do, but with man as rational, in how- 
ever humble a degree. And my contention is, as expressed in 
the title of this lecture, that man is organic to the world ; or 
as I have just put it, the world is not complete without him. 
The intelligent being is, as it were, the organ through which 
the universe beholds and enjoys itself. 

This is, of course, a well-known position of speculative 
idealism, but I wish to present it, in the first instance at any 
rate, rather from the side of the higher naturalism, and to 
emphasize the fact of man's rootedness in nature, so that the 
rational intelligence which characterizes him may appear as 
the culmination of a continuous process of immanent devel- 
opment. I desire to do so because it has always seemed to 
me that some of the central difficulties of modern thought 
arise from the unconscious habit of treating man as if he 
were himself no denizen of the world in which he draws 
his breath — as if he were, so to say, a stranger visitant, con- 
templating ab extra an independent universe. Otherwise 
why, for example, should it seem so difficult — nay, impos- 
sible, as so many philosophers would persuade us — for man 
to know things as they are ? why should it be impossible for 
him to know the real nature of anything, or, in the last re- 
sort, to know anything but his own states? The so-called 
epistemological problem which obsesses modern philosophy, 
from Descartes and Locke to Kant and Spencer and the 

about us than the worm in a flower-pot on a London balcony has of the 
life of the great city' {Hume, p. 286). 1 Tennyson, 'The Dawn'. 



112 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

most recent magazine discussions — this problem, with all the 
varieties of subjective idealism, agnosticism, phenomenalism, 
and sceptical relativism to which it has given rise, depends 
upon the presupposition of a finished world, as an independ- 
ently existing fact, and an equally independent knower, 
equipped, from heaven knows where, with a peculiar appara- 
tus of faculties. This subjective apparatus, brought to bear 
upon the foreign object, colours and distorts it by investing 
it with its own subjective peculiarities, and so the mechanism 
of knowledge inevitably defeats its own purpose. Do what 
we may, our faculties get between us and the things, and we 
never know anything as it really is. As Locke sighs, we know 
not the real essence of a pebble or a fly or of our own selves. 
This persistent mystification depends largely, I urge, upon 
extruding man from the world he seeks to know. If we 
keep steadily in view the fact that man is from beginning to 
end, even qua knower, a member and, as it were, an organ of 
the universe, knowledge will appear to us in a more natural 
light, and we shall not be tempted to open this miraculous 
chasm between the knower and the realities which he knows. 
When one thinks of the labour and ingenuity expended upon 
this problem during the last three hundred years, it is easy to 
understand the impatience of the Pragmatists with the whole 
discussion. It is, indeed, encouraging to note that both the 
most recent movements in Britain and America — Pragma- 
tism and the so-called New Realism — seek, each in its own 
way, to rid philosophy of a self-made difficulty and to trans- 
fer discussion to more fruitful topics. ' Things are what they 
are experienced as/ says Pragmatism bluntly; 1 knowledge 
is a direct relation between the knower and the reality 
known, says Realism — it is e sui generis and as such cannot be 
explained ', for explanation, in the sense of resolving it into 
simpler elements, could only mean falsification of the fact. 2 

1 Dewey, Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 227. 
1 Cf. Prichard, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, p. 115. 



vi THE EYE-METAPHOR 113 

I would merely add, as a reason for dwelling on this point, 
that, if the imputation of subjectivism and relativity 
attaches with any justice to the seemingly objective con- 
structions of our knowledge, it will apply with even greater 
force to the world of values in which our inmost and most 
personal nature finds expression. If man's knowledge does 
not put him in touch with reality, how can his ideals be 
supposed to furnish a clue ? They will be treated as exotics, 
too delicate or, according to the critic's mood, too sickly for 
the common soil and the common air of the world. Whence, 
in that case, the seed was wafted and by what agencies it wa^ 
nursed to maturity, such critics do not too narrowly inquire. 

A further consequence of this view of intelligence as 
spectator ab extra is that the function of intelligence is con- 
ceived as purely cognitive, in the sense of simply reproducing 
or mirroring an independent, finished reality. Even specu- 
lative idealism, under the dominance of the eye-metaphor, 
sometimes falls into a similar mode of expression. ' I am 
the eye with which the universe beholds itself ' seems an apt 
expression for a divine experience, conceived on purely 
theoretic lines somewhat in Aristotle's fashion. But if it 
were simply reproduction as in a still mirror, we might 
reasonably ask, with Lotze, what point or value such a ' bar- 
ren rehearsal ' could possess. To Aristotle, the contempla- 
tion of which he speaks is not a passionless duplication of 
existence, but an experience of intensest fruition; it is the 
supremely blessed life. The word cognition misleads us by 
its exclusive reference to the object as something external; 
we forget that cognition is an experience of the soul, and as 
such has necessarily its feeling-value. We forget that the 
existence of such living centres, capable of feeling the beauty 
and grandeur of the world and tasting its manifold qualities, 
is what is really significant in the universe. To a collocation 
of purely unconscious facts it would be impossible to attrib- 
ute any value either collectively or individually. All values 



ii 4 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

are, in this sense, conscious values. Hence it is that the sen- 
tient and, still more, the rational being appears as the goal 
to which nature is working, namely, the development of an 
organ by which she may become conscious of herself and 
enter into the joy of her own being. Or, as Browning more 
finely puts it in Paracelsus: 

God tastes an infinite joy 
In infinite ways. . . . 
. . . The wroth sea's waves are edged 
With foam, white as the bitten lip of hate, 
When in the solitary waste, strange groups 
Of young volcanos come up, cyclops-like, 
Staring together with their eyes on flame ; — 
God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride ! . . . 
The shining dorrs are busy ; beetles run 
Along the furrows, ants make their ado; . . . 
Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing-gulls 
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek 
Their loves in wood and plain — and God renews 
His ancient rapture ! 

It is this living experience, steeped in feeling and instinct 
with action, which is the real fact in which cognition, as 
such, is but an element. And, in the case of man, such ex- 
perience means the building up of a mind and character. 
There is no virtue in the mere repetition, in the subject, of an 
independent object : the function of cognition in experience 
is either to subserve our practical activity or to awaken in- 
sights of beauty, the sympathetic thrill of kindred being and 
the pure joy of intellectual conquest and harmony. 1 

1 The idea of intelligence as purely cognitive seems to be consistent 
only with the epiphenomenal or automaton theory of consciousness. On 
that theory mind is simply the inactive and useless mirror of an inde- 
pendent happening. And, as a matter of fact, Shadworth Hodgson's ex- 
pressions, in his exposition of the theory, are the best examples that 
could be cited of the view of consciousness which I am repudiating. 
' Pain ', he says consistently, ' must be held to be no warning to abstain 
from the thing which has caused pain ; pleasure no motive to seek the 
thing which has caused pleasure; pain no check, pleasure no spur, to 



vi THE CARTESIAN DUALISM 115 

The more we allow our thoughts to play freely on the 
idea, the more extraordinary appears the substantiation of 
the knower into a being outside the world he desires to know, 
and the treatment of the two as separate and independent 
facts which have a merely contingent relation to one another^ 
Yet this is just the dualism of the res cogiians and the 

with which modern philosophy starts in Descartes 
and from which, in many quarters, it has not even yet 
emancipated itself. The two facts, as I have said, are 
conceived as having no organic relation to one another : 
the one is in no way the complement of the other, in such 
fashion that the being of things naturally passes over into 
consciousness and finds expression there, while ( from the 
other side) the conscious being as naturally reads the face of 
a world which he feels to be continuous with his own being. 
The process of knowledge accomplishes itself, as a matter 
of fact, with perfect simplicity and naturalness; but philos- 
ophers have dug a chasm which cannot be bridged between 
the knowledge of the kr. nceived as a state of his own 

being, and the real thing which he knows, or rather fancies 
he knows. For if there is no essential relation between the 
two facts, such as would constitute them no longer two un- 
connected facts, but two elements in one single fact — if they 
are taken as really brought, so to speak, into accidental con- 
tact with one another — what guarantee is there that my 
knowledge represents things as they really are? Is that pos- 
sibility not rather excluded ab initio f For I can know 
things only as they appear to me through the medium of my 
bodily and mental organization: my knowledge, therefore, 
must inevitably be merely phenomenal, merely relative. On 
one side of the chasm we thus get the thing-in-itself. the 
thing as it is supposed to exist apart from being known. 

action.' Consciousness when it arises, he says, is ' not a new existence 
but the perception of the pre-existing world ', ' nothing but a mirror or 
reduplication of the pre-existing and simultaneously existing world '. 
(Theory of Practice, vol. i. pp 338, 339, -16.) 



n6 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

which is eventually described, with perfect consistency, as 
the unknown and unknowable; and on the other side of the 
chasm we have a subjective modification, which is as a veil 
between us and the object rather than a revelation of its real 
nature. Because we began by denying any real relatedness 
between nature and mind, we end with the doctrine of the 
relativity of knowledge. Relatedness means continuity of 
process and truth of result — knowledge and reality as com- 
plementary elements of one system. Relativity, in the cur- 
rent sense of the term, means a finished world of fact com- 
plete in itself, but subsequently brought into contact with 
(what would almost seem to be) some extra-mundane 
creature in whom it produces certain effects. But these 
effects, being conditioned mainly by the creature's curious 
constitution, must be held to reveal rather the nature of the 
creature than the nature of the world which started the 
process of which they are the outcome. 

The vitality of the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge 
— which is as much as to say the truth it contains — is en- 
tirely derived from its polemic against a wrongly-stated 
Realism, and against the copy-theory of truth, which our 
present-day pragmatists have made the object of their attack. 
The copy-theory, on the basis of the traditional philosophical 
dualism, defends what it calls the * correspondence ' of 
knowledge with reality. In that correspondence it finds its 
definition of truth. It is easy, of course, to put a sense upon 
the phrase which would remove any objection to such a defi- 
nition ; but correspondence, for the copy-theory, means such 
a relation as obtains between a picture and the object which 
it represents. In some such way the independent world of 
^things, with their qualities and relations, is supposed to be 
reproduced in the knowing mind. We witness in Locke 
and Berkeley the break-down of this theory. Locke still 
clings to the theory in the case of the primary qualities: 
their ' patterns ' do really exist in the things quite apart from 



vi LOCKE AND BERKELEY 117 

our knowledge of them. But he abandons it in the case of 
the secondary qualities; the latter exhibit only such corre- 
spondence or conformity as exists between a cause and its 
effect. They are true in so far as they are the effects which 
things, in virtue of modifications of their primary qualities, 
are fitted to produce in us. They are the effects which God 
has arranged that things should produce, when acting on our 
sensibility. 1 Berkeley's philosophy is a criticism of this com- 
promise. The primary qualities are as much ideas of sense, 
he argues, as the secondary : where the secondary are, there 
the primary are also, namely, in the mind. The notion of an 
idea being ' like ' some original in a non-mental world is 
transparently absurd, inasmuch as the comparison required 
to ascertain such likeness is inherently impossible; an idea 
can only be like an idea^Our whole sense-experience, there- 
fore, is treated by Berkeley, as Locke treated the secondary 
qualities, namely, as a series of effects produced in the indi- 
vidual mind — produced, however, not as Locke assumed by 
an independent world of material substances, but by the im- 
mediate causation of the divine will. There is therefore no 
relation between knowledge and an external or trans-sub- 
jective reality which it has in some fashion to copy or repre- 
sent. Knowledge is entirely an internal experience, and our 
sense-ideas and their relations of concomitance and se- 
quence, being taken as the immediate inspiration of the 
Almighty, are themselves the only originals we require. 
Berkeley's world, apart from his theistic postulate, is, in 
fact, in William James's phrase, ' a world of pure experi- 
ence ', in which one part points cognitively to other parts, but 
which does not point as a whole to any extra-experiential 
world on which it rests or which it somehow renders to us. 
Conclusive as a criticism of the ordinary correspondence- 
theory, Berkeleianism is vitiated by the fact that it takes as 
its starting-point and basis the fundamental tenet of repxe* 
1 Essay, II. 30. 2. 



n8 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

sentationism, the presupposition that the primary or direct 
object of knowledge is a state of our own mind. And if this 
is the very reverse of the truth, it follows that what is true 
in Berkeley's way of putting things must be re-stated in a 
form which will not conflict with the realism of our com- 
mon-sense beliefs. Berkeley is always elaborately anxious to 
persuade us that he is in agreement with ' the vulgar ', but 
neither he nor any of his interpreters or successors has suc- 
ceeded in convincing the world that this is really the case^7 
The Kantian theory is in some respects a return to the 
position of Locke. There are, of course, too many strands 
in Kant's doctrine to admit of its being presented as a con- 
sistent whole; but if we take it as it originally shaped itself 
in his own mind, we find a strong reassertion of the refer- 
ence in knowledge to real things. This is at once an initial 
assumption and, in the face of misunderstanding and chal- 
lenge, an explicit polemic against subjective idealism of the 
Berkeleian stamp. Kant resembles Locke also in starting 
with the acceptance of the representative theory of knowl- 
edge, the view, that is to say, that we are primarily limited to 
a knowledge of our own states. In his own words, we know 
' only the mode in which our senses are affected by an un- 
known something V As Hutchison Stirling puts it, 2 the 
scratch only knows itself; it knows nothing of the thorn. 
But whereas Locke applied this causal method of interpreta- 
tion only to the secondary qualities, the primary qualities are 
also treated by Kant as subjective for a different reason, 
seeing that he regards space, and consequently the geomet- 
rical or space-filling qualities of bodies, as a contribution of 
the mind in the act of knowing. But if both primary and 

1 Prolegomena, section 32. ' It is incomprehensible ', he explains else- 
where (Prolegomena, section 9), 'how the perception of a present ob- 
ject should give me a knowledge of that object as it is in itself, seeing 
that its properties cannot migrate or wander over (hiniiberwandern) 
into my presentative faculty.' 

2 Textbook to Kant, p. 353. 



vi KANT'S PHENOMENALISM 119 

secondary qualities are thus subjective constructions, the 
real object which we set out to know remains on the farther 
side of knowledge as an unattainable Beyond — the abstrac- 
tion of an unknowable thing-in-itself. This is the aspect of 
the Kantian theory of knowledge which made his doctrine 
one of the fountain-heads of modern agnosticism. In conse- 
quence of our ignorance of this real background, our knowl- 
edge is throughout a knowledge only of phenomena. The 
world of experience, whether of ordinary life or of scientific 
theory, is, for Kant, either a quasi-Berkeleian world of 
sense-ideas, connected together by the rational bonds 
of the categories instead of by the associational forces of 
custom; or it is the distorted vision of a reality, the fact of 
whose existence is an immediate certainty present in all 
our experience, but whose nature that experience is essen- 
tially impotent to reveal. Reality on this view is the ulti- 
mate subject of predication, but all our predicates only 
draw more systematically round us the veil of our own sub- 
jectivity. 

Popular philosophy may be said to oscillate between an 
agnostic relativism based on such considerations, and a semi- 
Lockian view apparently sanctioned by the teaching of 
physical science and physiological psychology. We come 
back in such thinking to the old distinction between the 
primary qualities, as constituting the real nature of the ob- 
jective fact, and the secondary, as subjective effects depend- 
ent upon the specific constitution of our organs of sense and 
nervous structure generally. We return, in short, to the 
conception of the physical scheme of moving particles or 
ethereal vibrations of varying amplitudes and speeds as the 
self-subsisting world, and all the rest as passing appearances 
to finite subjects. But this is practically to adopt the funda- 
mental presupposition of materialism. 

The crux of the philosophical question thus becomes the 
objectivity of the secondary qualities — whether, or in what 



120 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

sense, they are to be taken as objective determinations of 
reality. In one sense, of course, every one would admit their 
objectivity, in so far as they have in each case their physical 
counterpart, in the shape of some specific arrangement of 
molecules or some specific form of motion. But, according 
to the popular scientific view which we are considering, that 
molecular mechanism gives us the truth of nature. It is 
nature as an objective system; whereas our translation of 
the mechanism into terms of sensation is a subjective proc- 
ess. The results of that process may be of much interest 
to us, because of the feeling-tone of the secondary qualities 
and their intimate connexion with the higher emotional life; 
but they are not, as such — as colour, for example, or as 
sound — predicable of nature in the same way in which the 
physical properties are. There is a fine chapter in Lotze's 
Mikrokosmos, 1 in which he enters an eloquent protest 
against the stereotyped error of supposing that we come 
nearer the truth of reality when we abstract in this way from 
the conditions under which it is revealed to us — when we 
seek that truth not in the appearance of the world as it offers 
itself to the knowing mind, but in the stage-mechanism 
which effectuates this result. ' Instead of setting up the ex- 
ternal as the goal to which all the efforts of our sensation are 
to be directed, why should we not rather look upon the sensu- 
ous splendour of light and sound as the end which all these 
dispositions of the external world, whose obscurity we de- 
plore, are designed to realize ? What pleases us in a drama 
that we see developed before us on the stage is the poetical 
Idea and its inherent beauty; no one would expect to enhance 
this enjoyment or discern a profounder truth if he could in- 
dulge in an examination of the machinery that effects the 
changes of scenery and illumination. . . . The course of the 
universe is such a drama ; its essential truth is the meaning 
set forth so as to be intelligible to the spirit. The other in 
1 Book III, chap, iv, ' Life in Matter '. 



vi THE SECONDARY QUALITIES 121 

which, deceived by prejudice, we seek the true being of 
things, is nothing but the apparatus on which depends that 
which alone possesses value, the reality of this beauteous 
appearance. . . . Let us therefore cease to lament as if the 
reality of things escaped our apprehension; on the contrary, 
their reality consists in that as which they appear to us; 
and all that they are before they are made manifest to us is 
the mediating preparation for this final realization of their 
very being. The beauty of colours and tones, warmth and 
fragrance, are what Nature in itself strives to produce and 
express, but cannot do so by itself; for this it needs as its 
last and noblest instrument the sentient mind, which alojie 
can put into words its mute striving and, in the glory of 
sentient intuition, set forth in luminous actuality what all 
the motions and gestures of the external world were vainly 
endeavouring to express.' 

Common sense clearly takes this view, and rejects the 
cheap profundity of popular science. Colours and sounds 
are for it not merely sensations or internal states; they are 
unmistakable predicates of the real. And a better psycho- 
logical analysis bears out this presupposition. When the 
psychologist introspectively analyses what he calls the 
sensation of red, what he is really analysing is the process 
of perceiving a red object. Red, as a conscious fact, is from 
beginning to end a quality of objects. Just consider for 
a moment what the world would be if it were stripped of the 
secondary qualities; remove the eye and the other senses Vi 
and what remains ? As Stirling vividly puts it, taking as his 
instance the astronomical spectacle of the heavens : * All 
that is going on, all these globes are whirling in a darkness 
blacker than the mouth of wolf, deeper than the deepest pit 
that ever man has sunk — all that is going on, all that is 
taking place in a darkness absolute; and more ... in 
a silence absolute, in a silence that never a whisper . . . 
never the most momentary echo breaks. . . . It is in a cave, 



\22 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 



l 



a den, blacker than the blackest night, soundless and more 
silent than the void of voids, that all those intermingling 
motions of the globes go on — but for us, that is; but for an 
eye and an ear and a soul behind them.' * It is enough to 
make this simple reflection to recognize the helpless unreality 
of the abstraction. As Professor Bosanquet says, 'If the 
world apart from knowledge has no secondary qualities, it 
has hardly anything of what we care for. It is not recogniz- 
able as our world at all' 2 Moreover, if we are to reject the 
secondary qualities on account of their dependence on or- 
ganic conditions, are the primary not in the end in the same 
case? 

j find what I take to be the philosophical truth of the 
situation put with the simplicity and force of ripe meta- 
physical insight in the seventh Meditation of the late Pro- 
fessor Laurie's Synthetica. The fundamental point is that 
which I began by insisting on, that man the knower is 
within the real system which he knows, and that as regards 
his knowledge of nature ' his body is within the nature- 
system and continuous with it '. It is good for sanity of 
thinking to hold fast by the bodily aspect of man's existence; 
man's cognitive function is exercised through his organism. 
And, once more, do not let us be misled into treating the 
organism in turn, as we saw some theories treated the mind 
and its faculties, as a principle of isolation and subjectivity, 
cutting us off from the real. Do not let us be misled, I mean, 
into ascribing the specific qualities of the object as known to 
pe culiarities of our sense-organs rather than to anything 
inherent in the object itself. Man's organism is the very 
means by which he is put in relation with reality. Through 
it the content of the real world is conveyed to him, and 
through this communication he himself becomes a real sub- 
ject. For it cannot be too carefully remembered that the 

1 Philosophy and Theology (Gifford Lectures), p. 78. 

2 Logic, vol. ii, p. 308 (second edition). 



vi RELATEDNESS AND RELATIVITY 123 

subject is himself a pure abstraction, apart from the real 
system with which he is in relation and which gives him his 
mental filling. As Laurie puts it, ' I do not like to say 
subject is object and object is subject, lest I should be mis- 
understood; but in truth, the subject, in so far as it is 
a Real and not a mere entitative potency, is a Real by virtue 
of the object as reflected into it.' Hence the fact that con- 
sciousness of an external object, say, of a cloud, is the final 
result of a complicated set of processes, partly in external 
nature and partly within the body of the percipient, does 
not vitiate the truth of the result. * On the contrary the 
process exists for the very purpose of presenting that cloud 
as I see it, to the subject as conscious.' And the so-called 
secondary qualities of objects are just as real as space and 
time are. ' When physics has said its last word about that 
cloud as a dynamical system of molecules and vibrations, 
that too I shall be aware of only as " related " to conscious 
subject; and it will be as much " relative " as the cloud in 
all its summer beauty as seen by the eye of child or poet : 
that is to say, not " relative " at all. . . . For the real is 
truly to be found in the final presentation to subject; it is in 
that crisis that the thing gathers up all its causal conditions 
and prior processes (etheric, dynamic, or what not) and 
offers itself to us in all the richness of its phenomenal indi- 
viduality. It is at this point that the bony skeleton of ab- 
stract mathematico-physical explanation is clothed with flesh 
and blood and lives; it is this that touches the emotions of 
the human breast, and gives birth in poetry and the other 
arts to the highest utterances of genius regarding our com- 
plex experiences.' x Thus consciousness, as he puts it almost 
in Lotze's words, ' provides the last explanatory term of the 
presentation. ) Save in a conscious subject the object cannot 
fulfil itself. . . . The world without conscious subject is a 
world waiting for its meaning — an uncompleted circle wait- 
1 Synthetica, vol. i, pp. 83-5. 



124 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

ing to be closed. . . . Thus it is that the specific characters 
of our consciousness are the specific characters of the 
" other " or the object. The former do not merely corre- 
spond to the latter : they are the latter as fulfilled in a world 
which is a " system ", and in which, consequently, sentient 
mind and nature are in organic community.' * 

We get here a Natural Realism, but not of the old type ; 
for this Realism is also a Monism. The older Natural Real- 
ism, while it asserts the direct presence of reality to the 
percipient subject, appears still to hold the two-substance 
dualism from which the whole mischief flows. Consequently 
it seems to find a difficulty in reconciling the assertion of 
a direct and true knowledge of reality with the undoubted 
fact of process or mediation. Conceiving mind, no less 
than matter, as a substance (though a substance of essen- 
tially opposite nature, removed from matter, as the saying 
goes, by the whole diameter of being) the Natural Realists 
seem inclined to deny mediation altogether, and, as Hart- 
mann somewhat crassly expresses it, to put mind with its 
nose up against the material object. Hence such problems 
as Hamilton raises, in criticizing Reid, as to what external 
object it is that we immediately perceive, and his final con- 
clusion that the immediate object of knowledge is ' really 
an affection of the bodily organism '. 2 ' We actually per- 
ceive at the external point of sensation and we perceive 
the material reality,' but ' we perceive through no sense 
aught external but what is in immediate relation and in 
immediate contact with its organ '. 3 Hence, as he puts it 
more elaborately in his edition of Reid, ' the mind per- 
ceives nothing external to itself except the affections of 
the organism as animated, the reciprocal relations of these 
affections and the correlative involved in the consciousness 
of its locomotive energy being resisted '. ' The primary 
qualities are perceived as in our organism ', and such per- 

1 Synthetica, vol. i, pp. 91, 107. 2 Lectures on Metaphysics, vol ii, p. 137. 
3 Ibid., pp. 129-30. 



vi NATURAL REALISM 125 

ception ' does not, originally and in itself, reveal to us the 
existence, and qualitative existence, of aught beyond the 
organism ' ; while ' colour in itself, as apprehended or 
immediately known by us, is a mere affection of the sentient 
organism, and therefore, like the other secondary qualities, 
an object, not of perception, but of sensation, proper'. 1 
Such a theory is not the Natural Realism of common sense 
at all, and would never have been devised but for the mate- 
rialistic substantiation of mind as a so-called immaterial 
substance, which must somewhere and somehow come in 
contact with any object if it is to perceive it. It is part of 
Hamilton's theory that the mind is present in this way at 
all parts of the organism and not merely in the brain, so 
that, for example, ' the mind feels at the finger-points as 
consciousness assures us '. 2 Now it is certainly on the 
physical continuity of my organism with the whole material 
system that my entire knowledge of that system depends; 
but for knowledge so mediated there is neither near nor 
far. What I locate at the end of my fingers is exactly on 
the same footing as the remotest star projected on the 
bosom of the night. They are both mediated by a process; 
but the mind is present to both, and they are both per- 
ceived directly and as they are. Body is the medium of 
mind in a far more intimate sense than is contemplated 
in such a theory of their connexion as Hamilton's language 
would imply. Materialistic as it may sound, it would be 
far more correct to say that the body perceives, than to 
figure physiological movements and contacts transmitted 
or passed on, as it were, to a second entity called mind. 3 

1 Hamilton's Reid, vol. ii, pp. 881, 885. 

2 Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. ii, p. 128. 

3 Locke, it is perhaps worth remembering,' left it an open question 
' whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly 
disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to mat- 
ter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance ' ; and he was of opinion 
that ' all the great ends of morality and religion are well enough secured, 
without philosophical proofs of the soul's immateriality ' (Essay, IV. 3. 6). 



126 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

Perhaps it would sound materialistic only because, under 
the unconscious influence of the long dualistic tradition, 
we continue to think of the body in merely physical terms. 
Aristotle, it will be remembered, compared the distinction 
between body and soul to that between .matter and form, 
and defined soul as the realization of the potentialities of 
the organized body — the completed idea, so to speak, of 
that which it has it in it to be. Hamilton's abandonment 
of the notion of a special seat of the soul — his conception of 
it as present at every part of the bodily organism — might, 
in itself, be taken as a step in the direction of a truer theory; 
but as actually stated, in terms of the old metaphysical 
dualism, it is a grotesque combination of the points of view 
of physiology and of common sense — a combination which 
fails in justice to the truth of either. 

To return to the question of the secondary qualities, it 
is obvious how a genuinely realistic theory such as I have 
sketched and illustrated, incorporates into itself all that 
is true in the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge. The 
range as well as the quality of our knowledge of the external 
world — its delicacy and precision — depend undoubtedly on 
the structure of the sense-organs and the nervous system 
generally. The universe must therefore appear differently 
to different creatures according to the difference pf their 
equipment in these respects. The development of the 
special senses out of a general sensibility to contact is an 
evolutionary commonplace. One creature exhibits a vague 
organic sensitiveness to the difference between light and 
darkness. By another, with a rudimentary organ of vision, 
the difference between the two is clearly perceived; and, 
as the organ is perfected, there is added, with ever-increas- 
ing precision and delicacy, the perception of* the different 
colours and the discrimination of their finest shades. Simi- 
larly the sense of hearing advances from ' a sensitiveness to 
concussions affecting the whole environment ' to accurate 



vi EVOLUTION OF SENSE-ORGANS 12; 

localization and the refinements of musical appreciation. 
Each creature, therefore, has its own world, in the sense 
that it sees only what it has the power of seeing; but what 
it apprehends, up to the limit of its capacity, is a true 
account of the environment, so far as it goes. And the 
progressive development of more delicate organs of appre- 
hension just means the discovery of fresh aspects of the 
world, qualities and distinctions of its real being, too subtle 
to be appreciated by the ruder instruments previously 
at our disposal. There is no explanation possible of the 
evolution of the sense-organs and of the sentient organism 
generally, unless we assume the reality of the new features 
of the world to which that evolution introduces us. The 
organism is developed and its powers perfected as an instru- 
ment of nature's purpose of self-revelation. 1 

And what is thus asserted of the secondary qualitieT 
will hold also of what Professor Bosanquet in one place calls 
the ' tertiary ' qualities, the aspects of beauty and sub- 
limity which we recognize in nature, and the finer spirit of 
sense revealed by the insight of the poet and the artist. 
These things also are not subjective imaginings; they give 
us a deeper truth than ordinary vision, just as the more 
developed eye or ear carries us farther into nature's refine- 
ments and beauties. The truth of the poetic imagination 
is perhaps the profoundest doctrine of a true philosophy. 
' I am certain of nothing ', said Keats, ' but of the holiness 
of the heart's affections and the truth of Imagination.' It 

1 Instead of speaking of primary and secondary qualities, Laurie sug- 
gests a distinction between the quantitative or common sensibles, as Aris- 
totle called them, and the qualitative or proper sensibles, and he points 
out, suggestively, as it seems to me, that ' through these qualitative 
affections we ascertain certain peculiar characters of the quantitative 
external which, but for the subjective qualitative feeling, would never 
have been the object of physical investigation at all'. Science, when 
thus set upon the track, can show us the quantitative equivalent of a 
colour or a sound ; but it is as if ' the more subtle characters of the ob- 
ject cannot be conveyed quantitatively in sensation but only qualita- 
tively'. Cf. Synthetica, vol. i, pp. 1 14-16. 



128 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD lect. 

is with the second of these far-reaching certainties that 
we are here concerned. The poet, it has been often said, 
is a revealer; he teaches us to see, and what he shows us is 
really in the facts. It is not put into them, but elicited from 
them by his intenser sympathy. Did Wordsworth spread 
the fictitious glamour of an individual fancy over the hills 
and vales of his beloved Lakeland, or was he not rather the 
voice by which they uttered their inmost spirit to the 
world? Remember his own noble claim for poetry as 
' the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned 
expression which is in the countenance of all science \ ' Of 
genius in the fine arts/ he says, ' the only infallible sign is the 
widening of the sphere of human sensibility, for the delight, 
honour and benefit of human nature. Genius is the intro- 
duction of a new element into the intellectual universe . . . 
it is an advance or a conquest made by the soul of the 
poet.' But, again, the new element is not imported; the 
advance is an advance in the interpretation of the real 
world, a new insight which brings us nearer to the truth of 
things. Hence, when Coleridge says in a well-known 
passage, 

O Lady, we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone doth Nature live, 

the statement is exactly the reverse of the truth, if it be 
taken to mean that the beauty of nature is reflected upon 
it from the subjective spirit of the observer, and does not 
express what Wordsworth calls ' the spirit of the place V 

1 Certainly when we give way to ' the pathetic fallacy ', investing 
nature with our transient moods of joy or grief, we fall into this sub- 
jectivism and falsify the facts. To take a glaring example: 

Call it not vain : they do not err, 
Who say, that when the Poet dies, 
Mute nature mourns her worshipper, 
And celebrates his obsequies : 
Who say, tall cliff and cavern lone 
For the departed Bard make moan. 



vi THE AESTHETIC QUALITIES 129 

Coleridge's lines are only true if they are understood, as 
they may be understood, to mean that unless we bring the 
seeing eye, we shall not see the vision. All idealism teaches 
the correlativity of subject and object; they develop pari 
passu, keeping step together, inasmuch as the objective 
world seems to grow in richness as we develop faculties to 
apprehend it. But all sane idealism teaches that, in such 
advance, the subject is not creating new worlds of knowl- 
edge and appreciation for himself, but learning to see more 
of the one world, ' which is the world of all of us '. 

Philosophy does not require us, then, to treat the beauty 
and sublimity of natural objects as subjective emotions 
in the bystander : we are entitled, on the principles I have 
been advocating, to treat them as qualities of the object 
just as much as the vaunted primary qualities. 

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven; 
We know her woof and texture ; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 

Keats attributes this result to ' cold philosophy ', at whose 
mere touch all charms fly. The poet's complaint is that a 
knowledge of physical optics---the laws of refraction and 
so forth — reduces the rainbow to an illusion, by showing 
us the mechanism on which the beautiful phenomenon 
depends. Keats, in fact, momentarily accepts the popular 
scientific view that this physical mechanism is the reality 
of the rainbow; and as a poet he mourns his lost illusion. 
But that is the abstraction against which our whole argu- 
ment has been a protest. The reality of the rainbow in- 

But Scott knows that they do err, and that he is merely playing with 
fancies, for he acknowledges it himself in the next stanza : 

Not that, in sooth, o'er mortal urn 

Those things inanimate can mourn. 

How different from this the transfiguring touch of the Wordsworthian 
imagination, even when it seems to involve a similar transference of 
emotion : 

The moon doth with delight 

Look round her when the heavens are bare. 



130 MAN ORGANIC TO THE WORLD vi 

eludes that very shimmer of lovely colour and the wonderful 
aesthetic suggestion which made the primitive poet call it 
God's bow in the clouds, and which still makes our hearts 
* leap up ' when we behold it in the sky. Things are as they 
'/ reveal themselves in their fullness to the knowing mind. 
As a French thinker expresses it, 'if we wish to form a 
true idea of the total fact, of the real, we must not eliminate 
from it precisely what completes reality, what makes it 
exist for itself \ l 

1 A. Fouillee, Evolutionnisme des Idees-forces, p. 279. 



LECTURE VII 
ETHICAL MAN. THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 

The last lecture elaborated the contention that man is 
to be taken as organic to the world, and his experience, 
therefore, in all its reaches, as a process by which the true 
nature of reality communicates itself to him. The terror 
of the subjective, as M. Fouillee happily puts it, is an obses- 
sion introduced into philosophy by Kant. If it was not 
exactly ' introduced ' by Kant, it was certainly intensified by 
his method of statement. I attempted to show the inherent 
absurdity of the position that, because knowledge is the result 
of a process, the truth of its report is thereby invalidated. 
Because, in order to be known, things must appear to the 
knowing subject, it surely does not follow, as Kant seems 
naively to assume, that they appear as they are not. Yet it 
is due to this presupposition that the relation between the 
thing-in-itself and the phenomenon becomes the negative 
one of contrast or difference, and forms the fundamental 
opposition on which the Kantian system is based. 1 On the 
view I have advocated, the relation between reality and ap- 
pearance is not this negative relation of contrast or differ- 
ence; the thing really does appear, or, in other words, reveal 
its nature. The thing as it is and the thing as it appears 
are, in principle, the same fact differently named, because 
looked at in different aspects. They may be intelligibly 
contrasted in so far as our knowledge is partial and does 
not therefore exhaust the nature of the object in question, 

1 As Hegel wittily puts it, Kant holds that what we think is false, 
because it is we who think it (Encyclopadie, section 60, Wallace's trans- 
lation, p. 119). 



132 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

but not in the Kantian and agnostic sense that, even as 
regards the part we know, the thing would look quite 
different if, per impossibile, we could see it as it really is. 
The whole conception of reality as meaning existence apart 
from being known, and the accompanying theory of truth as 
lying in the correspondence of knowledge with what is by 
definition unknowable — this whole conception, with the 
agnosticism inherent in its very statement, is swept away 
by the view which I have been urging. That view abolishes 
the thing-in-itself in the Kantian sense; or, if the term is 
retained, it teaches that the reality of the thing is not the 
thing apart from knowledge, but the thing conceived as 
completely known, the thing as it would appear in its com- 
plete setting to a perfect intelligence. Mind is thus no more 
condemned, as it were, to circle round the circumference 
of the real world, put off with outside shows, and unable 
to penetrate to its essential core. Mind is set in the heart 
of the world; it is itself the centre in which the essential 
nature of the whole reveals itself. 

So far we have treated the question of man's organic 
relation to the world with almost exclusive reference to 
his cognitive experience of the external world. That is 
the connexion in which the question arises in modern 
philosophy, and it had to be first disposed of, for the reason 
stated at the beginning of the last lecture. If man's knowl- 
edge, I said, does not put him in touch with reality, how 
can his ideals be supposed to furnish a clue? In the con- 
cluding pages of the lecture we applied the principle of 
organic relation to the aesthetic aspects of our experience. 
But it is, as we have seen throughout, between man's nature 
as an ethical being and what is taken to be the completely 
non-moral nature of the world from which he springs, that 
the cleavage, the apparent break of continuity, has usually 
been most keenly felt. I have already referred to Huxley's 
passionate indictment of ' cosmic nature ' as not only ' no 



vii ETHICAL MAN AND NATURE 133 

school of virtue but the headquarters of the enemy of 
ethical nature '. Man is thus, in his moral nature, so far 
from being organic to the universe that, in such a view, his 
noblest qualities are a reversal of all its ways. Man is at 
odds with the cosmos : it is open war between them. ' Let 
us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of 
society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still 
less in running away from it, but in combating it.' With 
this characteristic call to arms the deeply-felt address 
concludes. 1 

A similar sense of dualism, and even of conflict, between 
ethical man and cosmic nature underlies the Religion of 
Humanity as formulated by Comte. In this respect the 
Religion of Humanity is one of the most characteristic prod- 
ucts of the nineteenth century. It is an ethical and 
religious idealism of a lofty type; but it is an idealism 
manque — an idealism truncated and imperfect — because 
infected by the agnostic relativism which we have seen to 
be characteristic of the period. There are many parallels 
between Comte and Kant, both in the positive and the 
negative aspects of their work, although Comte knew his 
German predecessor only at second-hand and reached his 
own conclusions independently. To both the moral is the 
foundation of intrinsic value, and both make the moral 
development of mankind the central point of reference in 
their systems. And, again, the doctrine of the phenome- 
nality or relativity of knowledge drives a wedge deep into 
the philosophy of both. If Kant in some degree extricates 
himself from his dualism, or at least shows others a way 
out, Comte's religious philosophy remains to the end, what 
he explicitly designates it, a ' subjective synthesis ' — a 
synthesis of humanity, that is to say, which leaves the 
rest of the universe out of account. An attempt to disen- 
tangle the true and the false in Comte's statement of the 
1 Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, 1893. 



134 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

philosophical and religious position will prove, I think, as 
instructive a method as we could adopt of carrying our own 
argument to its conclusion and illuminating the nature 
of the position to which the preceding lectures have been 
leading up. There is, besides, so much that is true and 
valuable in Comte's ideas that I am not unwilling to dwell 
for a little on a system of thought which has perhaps been 
treated by constructive thinkers in this country too exclu- 
sively in its negative aspects. 

The negative element in Comte's philosophy connects 
itself with his famous ' law of the three stages ' of human 
thought. Man begins by explaining events as the results 
of volitions like his own; this is the theological stage of 
thought, leading from Fetishism through Polytheism to 
Monotheism. When the insight into the uniformity of 
nature's processes makes the resort to interfering wills un- 
meaning, theology is supplanted by metaphysics, which 
finds the causal explanation of events in essences or powers, 
conceived as real entities behind and separate from the 
phenomena which they dominate. Such an essence, power, 
or faculty, is so manifestly just the duplicate of the phe- 
nomenon which it is invoked to explain, that it might be 
difficult to understand how such pure abstractions came to 
be substantiated, if we did not remember that the meta- 
physical stage was preceded by the theological. The 
essence is the ghost or residuum of the spirit which was 
formerly believed to control the fact. As Mill puts it, 
' the realization of abstractions was not the embodiment 
of a word, but the gradual disembodiment of a fetish V 
The metaphysical stage is thus essentially transitional and 
yields place in the fullness of time to the third, the posi- 
tive or purely scientific stage. Here thought gives up the 
search after transcendent causes, and limits itself to in- 
vestigating the laws of phenomena, that is to say, the 
1 Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 18. 



vii COMTE'S IDEA OF METAPHYSICS 135 

relations of resemblance, co-existence and sequence which 
obtain between different natural facts. Such a knowledge 
enables us to foresee the course of phenomena : voir pour 
prevoir is the motto of science. Foresight means the possi- 
bility of controlling the course of phenomena or, at least, 
of adapting our conduct to what we cannot change. And, 
as Comte strongly holds, science realizes its true function 
in the service of human life. With the spread of the positive 
or truly scientific spirit, theological and metaphysical debates 
will die a natural death, without the need of any explicit 
demonstration of the unreality of the conceptions on which 
they are based. 

It is a fundamental tenet, therefore, of the Positivist 
philosophy that our knowledge is only of phenomena and 
their laws. Comte also uses the term relative to describe 
the nature of his position, referring with approbation to 
Kant's distinction of the subjective and objective elements 
in knowledge. Although we can eliminate the subjective 
peculiarities which belong to us as individuals, we cannot 
rise above the subjectivity which is common to our species 
as a whole ; and, accordingly, ' our conceptions can never 
attain to a pure objectivity. It is therefore as impossible 
as it is useless to determine exactly the respective contri- 
butions of the internal and the external in the production 
of knowledge.' x 

The criticism which I would offer of this position is, in 
sum, that it conveys a false idea of what metaphysics con- 
sists in, and that it depends itself upon the false idea which 
it repudiates. Comte adopts the view of the ordinary 
empiricist that the metaphysician or the transcendental 
philosopher is ceaselessly employed in the quest or elabora- 
tion of transcendent noumena, which are really duplicates 
of the facts to be explained. There have been, doubtless, 
historical examples of such a procedure — to be treated as 
1 Positive Polity, vol. ii, p. 30 (English translation). 



136 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

beacons of warning — but it is ludicrous to attribute it to 
the greater philosophers. Metaphysics is simply the attempt 
to think things out — to exhibit the relation of the facts to 
one another and thereby to reduce them finally to a coherent 
system. To do this is to disclose the informing principle 
of the whole. Certainly, whatever may be true of the past, 
idealistic philosophy since Kant has been mainly engaged 
in exploding the notion on which Comte proceeds, that the 
phenomenon and the noumenon are two separate facts, or 
that the reality is something apart and different from 
its appearances. I have said that Comte proceeds on this 
notion because, although he dismisses as false the explana- 
tions which he takes to be proffered by the metaphysician, 
and himself abandons the metaphysical quest, it is appar- 
ently because of the impotence of our faculties that he does 
so, and not on account of the falsity inherent in such a 
statement of the philosophical problem. He speaks of the 
' insolubility ' of the question much in the style of Kant, 
and his characterization of our knowledge as ' only of 
phenomena ' seems to rest on similar grounds. Otherwise 
why the regretful 'only'? 'For the assertion that we 
know only phenomena,' says Caird, 1 ' has no meaning 
except in reference to the doctrine that there are, or can 
by us be conceived to be, things in themselves, i. e. things 
unrelated to thought; and that while we know them to 
exist, we cannot know what they are. Now this dogma is 
simply the scholastic realism, or what Comte calls meta- 
physics, in its most abstract and irrational form. It is a 
residuum of bad metaphysics, which by a natural nemesis 
seems almost invariably to haunt the minds of those writers 
who think they have renounced metaphysics altogether/ 
The misconceptions involved in the imputation of relativity 
have been sufficiently dealt with in the preceding lecture. 
Obviously the quaint idea of ' apportioning exactly the 
1 The Social Philosophy of Comte, p. 121, 



vii CENTRAL PLACE OF RELIGION 137 

respective contributions of the internal and the external 
in the production of knowledge ' derives any plausibility 
it possesses from the conception of the knowing subject 
as entirely outside the world he seeks to know. To this 
original denial of an organic relation between man and the 
rest of the cosmos are traceable, we shall find, the charac- 
teristic features of Comte's social and religious doctrines. 
But let us first consider the truths which these doctrines 
contain. 

Comte is strongly impressed by the central function of 
religion in human experience. Religion, he says, 1 embraces 
the whole of our existence, and the history of religion re- 
sumes the entire history of human development. In religion 
man attains harmony of life through recognition of his 
dependence on a Power which sustains and encompasses 
his life — a Being whom he can worship and love, as the 
source and embodiment of all that is adorable, and as the 
sustaining providence to which he owes every good that he 
enjoys. We must love the Power to which we submit; 
otherwise there is nothing religious in our submission, 
nothing but resignation to a fatality. Further, Comte 
rightly holds that only in the moral affections are there 
revealed to us qualities to which we can bow in worship and 
in love. The external world, regarded by itself and in its 
merely mechanical aspects, possesses, as we have seen, no 
intrinsic value. Taken in abstraction, as Comte takes it, 
it is, indeed, just what he calls it, a fatality with which we 
have to make our account, but in nowise a Power moving 
us either to gratitude or to worship. Size counts for nothing 
in such an estimate. It is the insight of religion and of the 
deepest philosophy that size has nothing to do with true 
greatness. Pascal's ' thinking reed ' is greater in death 
than the universe which overwhelms him. Comte's 
Religion of Humanity has the same thought at its root. As 
1 Positive Polity, vol. ii, p. 119. 



138 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

Mr. Frederic Harrison finely illustrates it : ' The man who 
reviles Humanity on the ground of its small place in the 
scale of the Universe is the kind of man who sneers at 
patriotism and sees nothing great in England, on the ground 
that our island holds so small a place in the map of the 
world. On the atlas England is but a dot. Morally and 
spiritually, our Fatherland is our glory, our cradle and our 
grave.' * 

Comte has no difficulty in showing that the individual 
man, alike in his intelligence, his activities and his affec- 
tions, is the creature and the organ of the race to which 
he belongs. The language he speaks, the intellectual tools 
he uses, the moral qualities of self-restraint, co-operation 
and mutual affection, all come to him as a heritage from 
the past. Quite as much as the material appliances of 
civilization which soften and humanize his lot, raising him 
above the grim struggle with external nature, they repre- 
sent the collective labours of unrecorded generations since 
the dim dawn of human history. Thus the very tissue of 
his life is woven for him by the collective activities of the 
race, which Comte conceives as one great Organism or 
living Being, whose existence is continuous throughout 
time, and which contains, at least in a mystical sense, its 
dead as well as its living and its still unborn members in 
one great fellowship. 2 In other organisms, Comte proceeds, 
the parts have no existence when severed from the whole, 
but this greatest of all organisms is made up of lives which 
can really be separated. Humanity would cease, he says, 
to be superior to other beings were it possible for her 



1 Creed of a Layman, p. 76. 

2 ' This mighty Being whose life endures through all time, and who is 
formed of the dead far more than of the living ' (General View of Posi- 
tivism, p. 235, Bridges' translation). The present is but a span or a sec- 
tion between the past and the future. It ' can only be properly conceived 
by the aid of the two extremes which it unites and separates ' (Positive 
Ptf/ity, vol. ii, p. 296). 



vii THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 139 

elements to become inseparable. Independence is neces- 
sary as well as harmony or co-operation; but the difficulty 
of reconciling them is so great as to account at once for 
the slowness with which this highest of all organisms 
has been developed. 1 We must not, however, in speaking 
thus of independence, lapse from the organic point of 
view ; for Comte immediately reminds us that ' man as 
an individual cannot properly be said to exist except in 
the exaggerated abstractions of modern metaphysicians. 
Existence in the true sense can be predicated only of 
Humanity; although the complexity of her nature pre- 
vented men from forming a systematic conception of it 
until the necessary stages of scientific initiation had been 
passed.' 

Humanity, therefore, becomes for the individual the 
object of religious adoration, the Great Being towards which 
every aspect of his life is directed. ' Our thoughts will be 
devoted to the knowledge of Humanity, our affections to her 
love, our actions to her service.' Humanity is the Provi- 
dence which mediates between its members and the system 
of external necessity which forms our environment, turning 
its very fatality into a means of moral development and self- 
perfection. To Humanity, therefore, is due the gratitude 
for all the benefits for which, in the past, men have mis- 
takenly poured out their thanks to an abstraction of their 
own invention. Unlike the Supreme Being of the old 
religions, Humanity is an object of worship whose existence 
is patent and indubitable, whose nature and the laws of 
whose existence we know — a Being, moreover, whom we 
can actively serve and really benefit. The beneficial and 
moralizing influence of the old theology in its day and gen- 
eration Comte willingly acknowledges, especially mentioning 
the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and the worship 
of the Virgin. But its function was, in his view, merely 

1 General View, p. 246. 



140 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

transitional and preparatory — ' to direct provisionally the 
evolution of our best feelings under the regency of God 
during the long minority of Humanity.' 1 ' Monotheism in 
Western Europe is now as obsolete and as injurious as 
Polytheism was fifteen centuries ago. . . . The sole effect of 
its doctrine is to degrade the affections by unlimited desires, 
and to weaken the character by servile terrors.' Humanity 
is not omnipotent, and therefore we do not expect from it 
the impossible. ' We know well that the great Organism, 
superior though it be to all beings known to us, is yet under 
the dominion of inscrutable laws, and is in no respect either 
absolutely perfect or absolutely secure from danger.' But 
just on that account religion does not exhaust itself in 
adoration; it finds its actual expression in the active service 
of Humanity. Immutable omnipotence had no need of 
human services, but Humanity, ' the most vital of all 
living beings known to us, lives and grows only through the 
unceasing efforts of its members.' Humanity is so far from 
being perfect that ' we study her natural defects with care, 
in order to remedy them as far as possible. Thus the love 
we bear her calls for no degrading expressions of adulation, 
but it inspires us with unremitting zeal for moral improve- 
ment.' To the Positivist, therefore, ' life becomes a con- 
tinuous act of worship, performed under the inspiration of 
universal Love. All our thoughts, feelings and actions flow 
spontaneously towards a common centre in Humanity, one 
Supreme Being — a Being who is real, accessible and sympa- 
thetic, because she is of the same nature as her worshippers.' 
The history of the long travail of Humanity, * her constant 
struggle against painful fatalities which have at last become 

1 Quoted by Caird, op. cit., p. 32. Cf. Swinburne's Hertha: 
I that saw where ye trod 

The dim paths of the night, 
Set the shadow called God 
In your skies to give light; 
But the morning of manhood is risen, and the shadowless soul is in sight. 



vii IS HUMANITY AN ABSTRACTION? 141 

a source of happiness and greatness, the history of the 
advance of man from brutal appetite to pure unselfish 
sympathy, is an endless theme for the poetry of the 
future.' Positivism offers us ' a religion clothed in 
all the beauty of Art and yet never inconsistent with 
Science V 

Such are Comte's claims for the new faith of which in his 
later years he constituted himself the high-priest. One 
valuable truth in the philosophical groundwork — a truth 
not peculiar to Comte, though he had an important influence 
in impressing it on modern thought — is the repudiation of 
the abstract individualism of the eighteenth century, and 
the insistence on the concrete reality of humanity as a uni- 
versal life in which individual men are sharers. Individual 
man is an abstraction of the metaphysicians, Comte tells us; 
he cannot properly be said to exist, if severed from the com- 
munity of this larger life. Now we are all of us Nominalists 
in our ordinary moods, and too apt to ridicule such a state- 
ment as a piece of fantastic mysticism. Accordingly, it is 
a common criticism of Comte that he sets up an abstraction 
for us to worship. But it is perhaps not too much to 
say that, by such a line of criticism, we cut ourselves off 
from religion altogether, and, with religion, from sound 
philosophy. The mystical union of the worshipper with his 
God is a cardinal article of religious faith. If humanity, 
as a universal, is to be dismissed as an abstraction, may 
not God, the supreme universal, succumb to a similar 
criticism ? 

Before taking up this Philistine attitude, let us apply the 
same test to the narrower case of patriotism, 2 whose more 
vivid associations may perhaps help us to appreciate the 



1 The passages quoted are all taken from the concluding chapter of the 
General View of Positivism. 

2 This paragraph was written two years before the war, and I have 
thought it best to let it stand exactly as it was spoken. 



142 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

reality of the larger and more passionless unity. Take 
Shakespeare's famous apostrophe to England: 
This happy breed of men, this little world, 
This precious stone set in the silver sea . . . 
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. 
Or Browning's ' Home-Thoughts, from the Sea ' : 

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died 

away; 
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay ; 
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; 
In the dimmest north-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand 

and gray; 
" Here and here did England help me : how can I help 

England ? " — say, 
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and 

pray, 
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. 
Or these lines of a younger poet : 

Never the lotus closes, never the wild-fowl wake, 
But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for Eng- 
land's sake. 
Is England, then, an abstraction ? Was Italy an abstrac- 
tion to the Italian patriots who fought for her freedom and 
unity in the middle of last century? ' Italy ', Mazzini said, 
' is itself a religion.' Was Israel an abstraction to the pious 
Jew? Nay, we know that he thought and spoke of Israel 
in the very terms which Comte applies to Humanity, as the 
great Being to whom the promises of Jehovah are made and 
in whom his purposes are fulfilled. He himself will be 
gathered to his fathers, but Israel, ' the servant of the Lord,' 
enjoys an age-long life. Ancient Israel is, in this respect, 
only the best-known example — touched to the finest issues — 
of a familiar historical fact. The individual, it has been 
said, is a late product of evolution. At an earlier stage he is 
largely merged in the tribal life; he does not round himself 
to a separate whole, with the modern sense of individual 
detachment and personal destiny. He acts as the organ of 



vii THE ANALOGY OF PATRIOTISM 143 

a larger life in which he is content to be, and apart from 
which he makes no personal claims. The growth of indi- 
vidual self-consciousness undoubtedly marks an advance. 
As Comte rightly points out, it is a mark of the perfection 
of the greatest of all organisms that the parts of which it 
consists are living beings which have an existence for them- 
selves. But however far such development may go, it can 
never mean that the individuals detach themselves alto- 
gether from the nation or the race, and cease to be channels 
of the corporate life which makes them men. They cannot 
place themselves outside the ' little world ' of man and con- 
tinue to exist, any more than they can take up an inde- 
pendent station outside the universe of which they are the 
product and the organ. 

May we not also explain by the analog}' of patriotism 
Comte's idealization of Humanity? How can we worship 
(it is often said), or even reverence and love, a Being with 
such a history — a Being, great masses of whose members 
offer, even now, such a spectacle of pettiness and folly, of 
grossness, baseness and all manner of wickedness? Alas, 
is it not the same when we turn our thoughts from the 
patriot's ' England ' to our countrymen in the flesh? How 
much that is vulgar and mean and vicious crowds with 
pain and shame upon the mind ! Yet, though we may be 
chastened and humbled — and inspired, as Comte also says, 
with zeal to make these things better — the features of our 
ideal are not blurred. Ideal England still stands before us 
as supremely real, the just object of our unstinted devotion, 
sacred to us as a heritage from all the brave and good who 
have laboured in her service, a fabric strong enough to bear, 
and, as it were, to redeem or transmute, the weakness and 
the evil which mingle with all human things. In a spiritual 
organism the evil is thrown off and perishes ; the good only 
remains and is incorporated, to become the substance of the 
future. So. with Comte. it is Humanity in its ideal aspect that 



144 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

is offered for our worship — Humanity purged of its own 
dross, militant, indeed, not perfect, but triumphant over the 
baser elements in its constitution, transforming obstacles 
into stepping-stones of progress and replacing the life of 
selfish struggle by one of universal sympathy and mutual 
help. And it is plain, as Seeley says, that ' the worship of 
Humanity belongs to the very essence of Christianity itself, 
and only becomes heretical in the modern system by being 
separated from the worship of Deity V As Blake puts it, 
with a kind of divine simplicity, in his Songs of Innocence: 

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love 

Is God our Father dear, 
And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love 

Is Man His child and care. 

For Mercy has a human heart, 

Pity a human face, 
And Love the human form divine, 

And Peace the human dress. 

The Religion of Humanity does, indeed, emphasize 
elements which are essential in the Christian view of God 
and the world, but which have often been neutralized, 
especially in theological systems, by the predominance of 
the old monarchical idea of God, conceived, in William 
James's happy phrase, as ' a sort of Louis XIV of 
the heavens \ But, presented as Comte presents it, as a 
substitute for the worship of God, the worship of a finite 
Being, however great, offers insuperable philosophical diffi- 
culties. Most people will think, with Hoffding, ' that the 
religious problem proper only begins where Comte's religion 
ends, viz. with the question as to how the development of the 
world is related to that of the human race and the human 
ideal.' 2 It is time to return, therefore, to consider the 
' subjectivity ' of the Positivist synthesis. 

1 Natural Religion, p. 75 (second edition). 

2 History of Modern Philosophy, ii. 359 (English translation). 



vii A SUBJECTIVE SYNTHESIS 145 

To judge from his own language, Comte appears to con- 
sider the subjective and relative character of his synthesis 
a merit rather than a defect. But to fail of the objective 
and the absolute, while it may doubtless be inevitable, 
must certainly, just to the extent of the failure, be pro- 
nounced a defect. Comte's attitude, therefore, can only be 
held as meaning that, since, in his view, objective knowl- 
edge is unattainable, it is better to rest satisfied with a 
result which honestly proclaims itself subjective than to 
pretend to a final synthesis which is beyond our powers. 
The peculiarity of Comte's scheme, however, is that it 
entirely depends on treating Humanity as a self-contained 
and self -creative being — a kind of finite Absolute — which 
evolves all its properties, and engineers all its advance, out 
of the resources of its own nature. Hence it comes that at 
the end he crowns it as God in a godless world. Comte, 
of course, does not fail to recognize that Humanity is not 
literally self-contained, but develops in a ' medium ' or 
environment furnished by the external or physical world. 
Indeed he lays stress on the fact that his synthesis f rests 
at every point upon the unchangeable order of the world ', 
as revealed by science; x he calls this the objective basis of 
his synthesis. It is the function of intellect to discover the 
laws of this universal order, teaching us how to modify the 
course of phenomena when that is possible, or, when that 
is not the case, to adapt ourselves to an inevitable necessity. 
And the social education of the race depends also, as he 
shows, 2 upon the ever-present consciousness of this external 
power and the coercions of its unchanging laws. But, in 
spite of the dependence thus acknowledged, he still proceeds, 
in building up his theory, as if there were no organic relation 
between man and the world which gives him birth. ' Ex- 
ternal fatality ' is the phrase he most commonly uses of the 
non-human world : it appears in the light of a hostile power 
1 General View, p. 19. ' Ibid., p. 253. • 



146 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

with which humanity is in conflict, rather than as an integral 
element in the single universe which we have to explain. In 
spite of his instructive classification of the sciences and 
his polemic against the ' materialism ', as he calls it, which 
seeks to reduce the higher to the lower, Comte's deification 
of Humanity really depends on the same practical severance 
of man from nature and the acceptance of the latter as a 
self-contained system of physical necessity. The difference 
is that, whereas materialism treats man as an evanescent 
product of cosmic nature, the idealist in Comte celebrates in 
Humanity the only object of religious reverence and love, 
and nature tends with him to take a secondary place. It 
is a necessary condition of the existence and evolution of 
humanity, but it is ultimately an x, a thing-in-itself, of 
whose real nature we know nothing. We cannot penetrate, 
he says, ' the unattainable mystery of the essential cause 
that produces phenomena ' ; 1 and having once accepted the 
false distinction between phenomena and essential causes, 
Comte feels himself precluded from any attempt to construe 
nature and man as elements in one system of reality. It is 
* metaphysical ', in his view, to relate nature and man in that 
way to a common principle, although it is apparently not 
metaphysical, but commendably positive and scientific, to 
unify the dispersive multiplicity of human phenomena in the 
conception of a single Life. 

But it is impossible to rest in a merely subjective syn- 
thesis. In reality Comte, in the natural progress of his 
thought, is led to bring the world of nature more and more 
within the scope of his system, and so to remove the dualism 
which makes the elevation of the human equivalent to the 
banishment of the divine. Professor Edward Caird has 
pointed out very clearly the crossing of two opposite lines of 
thought in Comte's philosophy. It was largely in a justifi- 
able reaction against a shallow, sentimental optimism and an 

1 Ibid., p. 34- 



vii ' THE SUPREME FATALITY ' 147 

external teleology that Comte originally represented Nature 
as a hostile, or at least indifferent power, from which every 
gift has to be wrung by man's own labour and fertility 
of device. Alan has had to constitute himself his own 
Providence. But, on the other hand, all through the Poli- 
tique positive Comte is found insisting ' that the influence of 
an external limiting fatality, which forces upon man the sur- 
render of his natural self-will was the necessary condition 
of the development of all his higher powers of intelligence 
and heart V It is not only the intellectual powers that are 
first called into action by the practical necessities of the 
struggle with nature ; the same struggle imposes on him the 
discipline of labour, and teaches him the need of co-operation 
with his fellows. It thus becomes the fostering nurse of the 
altruistic affections which otherwise would never make way 
against man's native egoism. ' But assisted by the supreme 
fatality [these are Comte's own words] universal love is 
able habitually to secure that personality 2 should be sub- 
ordinated to sociality.' From this point of view, Caird 
justly comments, the external fatality ' can no longer be 
called unfriendly, or even indifferent to man; or, rather, its 
immediate appearance as his enemy is the condition of its 
being, in a higher sense, his friend '. 

Comte's thought here is the same as Kant's in the little 
treatise, Idee su einer allgemeinen Gcschi elite, which, as I 
mentioned before, led some of the German pessimists to 
claim him as an adherent of their doctrine. But the pessi- 
mism is only on the surface, for Kant teaches that nature, 
if a niggardly stepmother as regards man's immediate hap- 
piness, is the power that converts him into a moral being 
and drives him on to all his higher attainments. 3 Comte's 
statements in the same sense are numerous and emphatic : 

1 E. Caird, Social Philosophy of Comte, p. 149. 

2 Comte uses this phrase to designate the selfish, as opposed to the 
social, impulses. 

3 This was the only one of Kant's writings which Comte knew at first- 



148 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

" We have to consider the exceeding imperfection of 
our nature. Self-love is deeply implanted within it, and 
when left to itself is far stronger than social sympathy. 
The social instincts would never gain the mastery, were 
they not sustained and called into exercise by the economy 
of the external world. . . . Thus it is that a systematic 
study of the laws of nature is needed on far higher 
grounds than those of satisfying our theoretical faculties. 
... It is needed because it solves at once the most diffi- 
cult problem of the moral synthesis. . . . Our synthesis 
rests at every point upon the unchangeable order of the 
world. ... To form a more precise notion of its influ- 
ence, let us imagine that for a moment it were really to 
cease. The result would be that our intellectual faculties, 
after wasting themselves in wild extravagances, would 
sink rapidly into incurable sloth ; our nobler feelings would 
be unable to prevent the ascendancy of the lower instincts ; 
and our active powers would abandon themselves to pur- 
poseless agitation. ... In some departments this order 
has the character of fate ; that is, it admits of no modifica- 
tion. But even here, in spite of the superficial objections 
to it which have arisen from intellectual pride, it is neces- 
sary for the proper regulation of human life. Suppose, 
for instance, that man were exempt from the necessity of 
living on the earth, and were free to pass at will from one 
planet to another, the very notion of society would be 
rendered impossible by the license which each individual 
would have to give way to whatever unsettling and dis- 
tracting impulses his nature might incline him. Our 
propensities are so heterogeneous and so deficient in 
elevation that there would be no fixity or consistency in 
our conduct, but for these insurmountable conditions. . . . 
Supposing us in possession of that absolute independence 
to which metaphysical pride aspires, it is certain that so 
far from improving our condition, it would be a bar to all 
development, whether social or individual." x 

hand. It was translated for him by a friend in 1824. He greatly admired 
it, and said that, if he had known it six or seven years earlier, it would 
have saved him the trouble of writing his treatises of 1820 and 1822. 

1 General View, pp. 16-20. Cf. Positive Polity, vol. ii, pp. 25-8 (' Gen- 
eral Theory of Religion '). 



vii COMTE'S FINAL TRINITY 149 

It would really be difficult to put the organic relation of 
nature to man more strongly; the external fatality has 
become a beneficent necessity. And in his later elaboration 
of the Religion of Humanity he goes so far in retracting the 
dualism of nature and man as to add Space and the Earth 
to Humanity as objects of worship. ' The Cultus of Space 
and of the Earth, completing that of Humanity, makes us 
see in all that surrounds us the free auxiliaries of Humanity.' 
The world-space as the Great Medium, the Earth as the 
Great Fetish, and Humanity as the Great Being to which 
they are subsidiary, form the fantastic Trinity with which 
the new religion concludes. Space is the medium in which the 
earth has shaped itself; the earth or the great fetish has 
abstained from exerting its colossal and elementary forces, 
and has sacrificed itself in its longing that the ' Great Being ', 
in which the highest perfection appears in the most concen- 
trated form, may develop. 

But, with Comte's presuppositions, this can be no more 
than a conscious appeal to poetry to cover with its flowers 
the cold reality of the situation. Comte says, indeed, that, 
just because Positivism has so completely emancipated 
itself from the old theological and metaphysical ways of 
looking at the world, it may safely adopt in imagination, that 
is to say, in art and religion, this primitive fetishistic view 
of nature ' without any danger of confusion between the two 
distinct methods of thinking, which it consecrates, the one 
to reality and the other to ideality V He ends thus, like 
Lange, with a flight from reality into the shadow-land of 
poetic fancy. But, in Comte's case, the imaginative effort 
is still more consciously make-believe; it hardly makes any 
claim on our serious belief. It is significant only as a final 
admission of the impossibility of resting, either philosophic- 
ally or religiously, in a merely subjective synthesis. As 
Caird says, commenting on the passage last quoted, ' a 
1 Synthase subjective, p. 40. 



150 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY lect. 

worship of fictions, confessed as such, is impossible. Art, 
indeed, is kindred with Religion, but that means only that 
Art is untrue to the immediate appearances of things, in 
order that it may suggest the deeper reality that underlies 
them.' And, after all, the Great Medium and the Great 
Fetish have little about them of the genuine intuitions of 
Art. If Comte had followed out his own correlation of 
nature and man to a serious conclusion, he would have found 
the true ' medium ' of Humanity's life in God, ' that Power 
which alone is great \ 1 

But to accept this view would have meant the disap- 
pearance of Positivism as a distinctive doctrine, for it would 
have involved a revision of the mistaken phenomenalism 
on which it is based. Such revision and reconstruction 
was not to be looked for from the founder and high- 
priest of the new religion. The progress we find is in the 
opposite direction. The subjective and relative character 
of the synthesis is emphasized by the strict subordination 
of knowledge to the moral ends of Humanity, or, in Comte's 
own phrase, the subordination of the intellect to the heart. 
' L'esprit doit etre le ministre du cceur.' This is as essential 
a feature of Positivism, says Dr. Bridges, 2 as the subordina- 
tion of egoism to altruism ; and it means for Comte, ' that 
the intellect should devote itself exclusively to the problems 
which the heart suggests, the ultimate object being to find 
proper satisfaction for our various wants. . . . The universe 
is to be studied not for its own sake but for the sake of man 
or rather of Humanity.' 3 * It is idle, and indeed injurious/ 
we read again, ' to carry the study of the natural order 
beyond the point needed for the work of the artificial order 
constructed by man.' 4 This short-sighted limitation of 

1 Tennyson, ' God and the Universe \ 

2 Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine, p. 32 (popular edition, 1910). 
8 General View, pp. 14, 26. 

4 Positive Polity, vol. ii, p. 39. 



vii USELESS KNOWLEDGE 151 

scientific inquiry to what can be shown to be of social utility 
became a fixed article of Comte's creed, and forms one of 
the most dangerous articles of the new religion. Even in his 
earlier work, the Philosophie bositiveS he had condemned 
sidereal astronomy as a grave scientific aberration, on the 
ground that the phenomena of the stellar universe appear 
to exert no appreciable influence on events within our solar 
system. Ten years later, in the first volume of the Positii : 
Polity, he was no longer content thus to limit astronomy to 
a knowledge of the solar system. It should restrict itself 
to a knowledge of the earth, and consider the other celestial 
bodies only in their relation to the human planet. No 
doubt the ancients were deceived in believing the earth to 
be the centre of the world; but it is the centre of our world, 
and accordingly the subjective synthesis ' concentrates the 
celestial studies round the earth '. By the time he had 
reached the fourth volume of the Positizv Polity, he was of 
opinion that, strictly speaking, the study of the sun and 
moon would suffice, although we might add to them, if so 
inclined, the planets of the ancients, but not the ' little tele- 
scopic planets ' due to modern discovery.- This is only an 
example of the lengths which he was prepared to go. No 
science, he thought, should be carried further as an abstract 
study than is necessary to lay the foundation for the science 
next above it in the hierarchy of the sciences, and so ulti- 
mately for the moral and social science in which they 
culminate. Any further extension of the mathematical and 
physical sciences should be merely ' episodic ' — limited, that 
is to say. to what may from time to time be demanded by 
the requirements of industry and the arts — and should be 
left to the industrial classes. It was. in fact, to be one of the 
main functions of the spiritual power, or the priesthood of 
the new religion, to restrain the intellectual activity of the 

1 In the sixth volume. 

5 Cf. Levy Bruhl. Philosophy of Auguste Comte, pp. 150-2. 



152 THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY vn 

community from wandering at large in the fields of useless 
knowledge. Comte says somewhere that the Religion of 
Humanity will keep as jealous a watch as mediaeval Ca- 
tholicism over the rovings of the intellect. 

This is not the place to enlarge on the short-sightedness 
of this incredibly narrow utilitarian view of knowledge — 
condemned, even from the utilitarian point of view itself, by 
the impossibility of foreseeing what researches are destined 
to lead to valuable applications and what are not. How 
often have the abstrusest and apparently most purely specula- 
tive investigations, or, again, researches into phenomena of 
apparently the most trivial kind, resulted in transforming 
our practical activities or revolutionizing our intellectual 
outlook on the world ! Bacon, who also subordinated knowl- 
edge to practice, knew that it is ' light ' not ' fruit ' which 
we must seek in the first instance. And while no man of 
science will undervalue the benefits which his discoveries 
may confer on his fellows, it is knowledge on its own ac- 
count which he first instinctively seeks; the rest, he feels, will 
be added, if his knowledge is true. Comte's proposal to select 
certain provinces as worth knowing and to leave others out 
of account, and to determine, moreover, with what degree of 
thoroughness the selected provinces are to be investigated, 
is so subversive of the primary faith both of science and 
philosophy that it comes near reducing the idea of truth 
to one of subjective convenience. These things are cited 
merely to show how the idea of stopping short with a sub- 
jective synthesis, of taking man as a world by himself, 
involves an arbitrariness of treatment which subtly affects 
Comte's whole method of procedure, and eventually makes 
him a traitor to the scientific spirit of which he had consti- 
tuted himself the champion. Thought, in whatever sphere, 
cannot stop short of the idea of an order or system of the 
universe as a whole. 



LECTURE VIII 
POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM 

We traced in the preceding lecture the conflict of ideas 
running through Comte's speculations. What is character- 
istic in his philosophico-religious theory, what gives him his 
distinctive place in the history of thought, is the sharp 
initial dualism between man and nature. This leads, in his 
theory of knowledge, to a pure phenomenalism or subjec- 
tivism, buttressed by a polemic against metaphysics which 
depends upon the same ' residuum of bad metaphysics ' that 
led Kant to his doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself. 
In his ethical and religious theory, it leads him to treat 
nature entirely as a mechanical system, an indifferent, if not 
a hostile power, which he therefore fitly describes as an ex- 
ternal fatality. For although man converts this fatality to 
his own uses, and makes its existence the instrument of his 
own advance in knowledge and goodness, this is represented 
as entirely man's own doing, making the best of an existing 
situation. Nature and man are not part of one scheme of 
things; nature is just, as it were, a brute fact with which 
man finds himself confronted. Hence man appears in the 
universe like a moral Melchizedek without ancestry, owing 
everything to himself, his own Providence, bringing into 
the universe for the first time the qualities which merit the 
attribute divine. And accordingly, the deification of man 
is equivalent to the dethronement of God. As Comte puts 
it in a notable, if somewhat blustering paradox, the heavens 
declare the glory, not of God, but of Kepler and Newton. 

Now, if we look simply at the historical process, as trace- 
able in the evolution, say, of the solar system and of our 
own planet, it is undoubtedly the case that in the time- 



154 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

sequence the authentic lineaments of the divine are recog- 
nizable for the first time in ethical man. And if we ignore 
the biological preparation and prefigurement — if we cut the 
world in two with a hatchet, as the saying is, leaving ethical 
man on the one hand and an external fatality on the other — - 
then man does seem the only source and seat of the qualities 
which have a rightful claim upon our worship. But, when 
we try to think seriously, can we really suppose that before 
the planets cooled sufficiently to admit of organic life, the 
universe (and by universe I mean here the All of existence) 
consisted literally of nothing else but space and its inorganic 
contents, or that before the appearance of palaeolithic man 
the good and the beautiful had no place in the nature of 
things. Surely these qualities are in their very nature 
eternal; they are not actually created by man, shaped by 
him out of nothing, and added henceforth to the sum of 
existence. It is to take the time-process too seriously — it 
is to take it falsely — to regard its separate parts as equally 
and independently real. Time, as Plato said in a fine figure, 
is the moving image of eternity. We are creatures of time, 
and in a sense it may be said with truth that we cannot 
comprehend the timeless; our thinking must to the end be 
done, whether we will it or not, in terms of time. But we 
can at least see that time is a continuous process, and that 
the nature of reality can only be revealed in the process as 
a whole. We must look to the end, as Aristotle said; or as 
Hegel put it, the truth is the Whole, the End plus the 
process of its becoming. 

It has been the fundamental contention of these lectures 
that the isolation or substantiation of the earlier stages of 
a time-process is a radical error in philosophy. Continuity 
of process, I have urged, is not inconsistent with the emer- 
gence of qualitative differences ; we pass from one plane of 
experience to another. But the whole process wears the 
appearance of a progressive revelation, not of a sheer addi- 



viii THE TIME-PROCESS 155 

tion to the life of the universe. It is impossible to get away 
from the conception of a natura rerum, whether we call it 
Nature, the Absolute, or God. And it seems impossible to 
apply in such a quarter the idea of actual progress or growth 
from less to more. I cannot believe that the feeling of this 
impossibility is no more than a metaphysical obsession in- 
herited, as M. Bergson appears to imply, from the philo- 
sophical mistakes of the past. ' Creative evolution ' is, I think, 
an eminently fruitful idea, if applied on the phenomenal 
level to emphasize the living reality of the process, the idea 
of the future as something to be won by our own effort, the 
outcome of which is unforeseeable on the basis of any 
analysis of the past or the present. As against the ordinary 
idea of a predestinated course of things, and especially 
against the idea of a future fatally determined by the past, 
M. Bergson seems to me to argue with convincing force; 
and this gives his pages such an extraordinary freshness — 
the freshness and the forward impulse of life itself. But 
the novelty is due, surely, to the inexhaustible nature of the 
fountain from which we draw, not to any inconceivable 
birth of something out of nothing. It all strikes one as a 
process of ' communication ' — to use a phrase of Green's — 
or, as I said already, of progressive revelation. The novelty 
is like that of entering a new room in the Interpreter's 
House, not of building out the universe into ' the intense 
inane.' It is novelty as it appears to us, in the time-process, 
but how can it be qualitatively new in ordine ad universum? 
How can anything come into being unless it is founded in 
the nature of things, that is, unless it eternally is? 

So that while in one sense it is true that we think to the 
end in terms of time, it is equally true that we cannot think 
any continuous process in time, we cannot think life or 
development (and, as Bergson says, it is only in the living 
being that we encounter time as a concrete reality) without 
being lifted in a sense above time and bringing in the 



156 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

eternal. If we were really absolutely subject to time, in- 
capable of transcending it, we should be imprisoned each 
of us as a single point of particularity in its own moment 
of time. We should be absolutely unchanging because we 
should be reduced to the abstraction of a bare point of ex- 
istence. To think of time as a process is therefore, ipso 
facto, to think of a reality which transcends time, and 
whose nature is revealed in the process. The truth, once 
more, is the Whole. We cannot, as philosophers, rest in 
any principle of explanation short of that which we name 
the Absolute or God. All experience might not unfitly be 
described, from the human side, as the quest of God — 
the progressive attempt, through living and knowing, to 
reach a true conception of the Power whose nature is re- 
vealed in all that is. Man, accordingly, does not step out- 
side of this universal life when he develops the qualities of a 
moral being; the specifically human experiences cannot be 
taken as an excrescence on the universe or as a self-con- 
tained and underived world by themselves. Man is the child 
of nature, and it is on the basis of natural impulses and in 
commerce with the system of external things, that his ethi- 
cal being is built up. The characteristics of the ethical life 
must be taken, therefore, as contributing to determine the 
nature of the system in which we live. Nay, according to 
the interpretation we have put upon the principle of value 
and upon the evolutionary distinction between lower and 
higher ranges of experience, the ethical predicates must 
carry us nearer to a true definition of the ultimate Life in 
which we live than the categories which suffice to describe, 
for example, the environmental conditions of our existence. 
' This fair universe ', says Carlyle, in the famous chapter in 
Sartor Resartus on Natural Supernaturalism, * is in very 
deed the star-domed city of God; through every star, 
through every grass-blade, and most through every living 
soul, the glory of a present God still beams.' ' Man,' he 



viii MAN THE TRUE SHEKINAH 157 

quotes elsewhere from Chrysostom, ' Man is the true Sheki- 
nah ' — the visible presence, that is to say, of the divine. We 
are far too apt to limit and mechanize the great doctrine of 
the Incarnation which forms the centre of the Christian faith. 
Whatever else it may mean, it means at least this — that in the 
conditions of the highest human life we have access, as no- 
where else, to the inmost nature of the divine. ' God mani- 
fest in the flesh ' is a more profound philosophical truth than 
the loftiest flight of speculation that outsoars all predicates 
and, for the greater glory of God, declares Him unknowable. 
And this, we saw, was the central truth of the Religion of 
Humanity to which it owes what vitality it possesses. It 
was one of Comte's boasts that the new God of his religion, 
as contrasted with the abstract deities of theology or meta- 
physics, was positive, verifiable like a scientific fact, an 
object which one could, as it were, directly see and touch. 
But it is only so far as he presses the organic point of view, 
so as to unite the Future with the Present and the Past in 
one mystical body, that ideal humanity assumes for the 
Comtist the features and proportions of deity. But hu- 
manity in the idea — humanity with the light of the ideal 
upon its upward path and the same light projected on the 
infinite possibilities of the future — is not a fact of the his- 
torical order. It is an idea every whit as mystical as that 
of God. For just in so far as we do not identify humanity 
with its own past and present, but endow it with the potency 
of an ampler and nobler future, just so far do we take man 
and his history as the expression of a principle of perfec- 
tion, whose presence at every stage constitutes the possi- 
bility of advance beyond that stage. Humanity is, in short, 
the organ and expression of the divine, just as the individ- 
ual, in Comte's way of putting it, is the organ and expres- 
sion of his race. Mankind has no more an entitative inde- 
pendence of God, the larger Providence, than the individ- 
ual possesses such independence of the proximate and 



158 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

lesser Providence which the pious Positivist recognizes in 
Humanity. 

Comte complains, with some show of justice, that the 
God of traditional theism, and still more Nature, which he 
says metaphysics substitutes for God, is an abstract and 
empty term. A critic might say that it is just the bare idea 
of potentiality or faculty, into which we refund the actual 
characteristics of the actual world. And in a sense this is 
true, just as it is true that the essence, if separated from its 
manifestation, becomes at once the blank abstraction of the 
unknowable. But to complain of this is to betray one's own 
bondage to a false and exploded metaphysics. Certainly, 
apart from our actual experience, God or the Absolute is a 
subject waiting for predicates, an empty form waiting to be 
filled. But we need be at no loss for predicates : in the 
words of the Apostle, ' the invisible things of him from the 
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by 
the things that are made, even his eternal power and God- 
head \ Where, indeed, should we gain a knowledge of God 
except from his manifestation? In precisely the same way, 
our knowledge of the character of a fellow-man is gained 
from his words and deeds. But, as Carlyle phrases it, 
' Nature, which is the time-vesture of God and reveals Him 
to the wise, hides Him from the foolish \ And among the 
foolish are enrolled not a few philosophical writers w T ho 
clamour for a knowledge of God, not as He reveals him- 
self in nature and in human experience, but as something 
to be known, it would seem, directly, apart from his mani- 
festation altogether. And when this craving for the im- 
possible is not satisfied, they either deny his existence or 
proclaim his nature to be unknowable. This false ideal of 
knowledge has crossed our path several times, and now that 
it meets us in this supreme instance, it may be well to 
examine it more closely so as finally to lay the spectre. 

Locke and Kant, as we have already seen in the sixth 



vm FALSE IDEAL OF KNOWLEDGE 159 

lecture, 1 are the typical modern examples of the working 
of this false ideal, and the chief sources to which its prev- 
alence in popular philosophy may be traced. In Locke it 
connects itself with the distinction between the qualities and 
the substance, in Kant with the distinction (fundamentally 
similar) between phenomenon and noumenon, the appear- 
ance and the thing-in-itself. Substance and quality are 
correlative terms by which we interpret \vhat is given or 
presented in perception. The distinction corresponds to 
that between subject and predicate or substantive and 
adjective, and neither member of the pair has any separate 
existence. Qualities do not fly loose as abstract entities, 
and substance does not exist as an undetermined somewhat 
— a mere ' that ' — to which they are afterwards attached. 
The idea of substance is the idea of the qualities as unified 
and systematized, and indicating, through this unity or 
system, the presence of a concrete individual. The two 
ideas, therefore, are in the strictest sense inseparable — the 
two aspects of every reality — its existence and its nature. 
Nothing exists except as qualitatively determined; and its 
existence as such and such an individual is, in fact, deter- 
mined or constituted by the systematic unity of the qualities. 
But the scholastic tradition of the substance as a substratum 
— something in which the qualities inhere — suggests the 
notion that substance and qualities are two separate facts, 
the substance or ' support of accidents ' being something 
behind the qualities, over and above them, a bit of reality- 
stuff, so to speak, an atom or core of mere existence, on 
which the qualitative determinations are hung. And the 
next step is to conclude, as Locke does, that this substance 
is a mystery which must remain for ever impenetrable by 
human faculties; for it is clear that the most exhaustive 
knowledge of the qualities cannot advance us one step 
towards a knowledge of what is, by definition, beyond or 

1 Cf . supra, pp. 1 16-19. 



160 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

behind all qualities. As Locke puts it, ' By the complex 
idea of extended, figured, coloured, and all other sensible 
qualities, which is all that we know of it, we are as far from 
the idea of the substance of body, as if lie knew nothing at 
air. 1 Our ignorance in this respect is universal. The sub- 
stance of spirit and the substance of body, he says in the 
same chapter, are equally unknown to us. ' We do not 
know the real essence of a pebble or a fly or of our own 
selves.' 

In Kant the contrast is between the thing-in-itself and 
the thing as it appears, between the noumenon and the 
phenomenon, and is more expressly connected with the idea 
of knowledge as a subjective affection. But his manner of 
arguing is often almost a verbal repetition of Locke's. 
' Supposing us to carry our empirical perception even to the 
very highest degree of clearness,' he tells us, for example, 
' we should not thereby advance a step nearer to a knowl- 
edge of the constitution of objects as things-in-themselves.' 2 
Or, again, 'All in our cognition that belongs to perception 
contains nothing more than mere relations. . . . Now by 
means of mere relations a thing cannot be known in itself, 
and it may therefore be fairly concluded that the presenta- 
tions of the external sense can contain only the relation 
of an object to the subject but not the internal nature of 
the object as a thing-in-itself.' 3 And he complains of the 
nature of our intelligence as ' an instrument of research 
unfitted to discover anything more than always fresh 
phenomena '. 4 

To this strange duplication of appearance and essence, 
and the substantiation of the one over against the other as 

1 Essay, II. 23. 16. 

2 General Remarks on Transcendental Aesthetic, Werke, vol. iii, p. 73 
(Hartenstein). 

8 ' Das Innere, was dem Objekte an sich zukommt ' (ibid., p. 76). 
4 Remark on the Amphiboly of the Conceptions of Reflection (ibid., 
p. 235). 



vin ESSENCE AND APPEARANCE 161 

a distinct and different fact, philosophers are indebted, as 
Berkeley says with delicate irony, ' for being ignorant of 
what everybody else knows perfectly well.' ' How often 
must I tell you ', says Hylas in the Dialogues, ' that I know 
not the real nature of any one thing in the universe? I may 
indeed upon occasion make use of pen, ink, and paper. But 
what any one of them is in its own true nature, I declare 
positively I know not/ Philosophers are distinguished, then, 
from the vulgar, says Philonous, only because 'they know 
that they know nothing '. ' That ', replies Hylas, ' is the 
very top and perfection of human knowledge.' 1 Must we 
not agree with Berkeley that the whole line of thought is an 
elaborate and perfectly gratuitous mystification? Yet what 
Berkeley put forward in irony was propounded at a later 
date in sober earnest by Sir William Hamilton. ' Our 
Science ', he says, ' is at best the reflection of a reality we 
cannot know; we strive to penetrate to existence in itself, 
and what we have laboured intensely to attain, we at last 
fondly believe that we have accomplished. But, like Ixion, 
we embrace a cloud for a divinity.' Man's ' science ' is 
actually ' nescience ', and the consummation of knowledge 
is a ' learned ignorance \ 2 Or, as he explains it in his 
Lectures: ' Matter or body is to us the name either of some- 
thing known or of something unknown. In so far as matter 
is a name for something known, it means that which appears 
to us under the forms of extension, solidity, divisibility, 
figure, motion, roughness, smoothness, colour, heat, cold, 
etc. . . . But as these phenomena appear only in conjunction, 
we are compelled by the constitution of our nature to think 
them as conjoined in and by something; and as they are 
phenomena, we cannot think them the phenomena of nothing, 
but must regard them as the properties of something that is 

1 Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, Third Dialogue, at 
the beginning. 

2 Discussions, p. 36. 



1 62 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

extended, solid, figured, etc. But this something, absolutely 
and in itself — i. e. considered apart from its phenomena — is 
to us a zero. It is only in its qualities, only in its effects, in 
its relative or phenomenal existence, that it is cognizable 
or conceivable; and it is only by a law of thought which 
compels us to think something absolute and unknown as the 
basis and condition of the relative and known, that this 
something obtains a kind of incomprehensible reality to us.' * 
Our ignorance, he is careful to explain, has nothing to do 
with the modest range of our senses or faculties. ' We may 
suppose existence to have a thousand modes, but were the 
number of our faculties co-extensive with the modes of being 
— had we for each of these thousand modes a separate organ 
competent to make it known to us — still would our whole 
knowledge be, as it is at present, only of the relative. Of 
existence, absolutely and in itself, we should then be as 
ignorant as we are now.' 2 It is hardly fair to father such 
fatuities upon ' a law of thought ' or ' the constitution of our 
nature '. It is no doubt in accordance with a law of thought 
that we refund the multiplicity of the qualities into the 
unity of the substance; but living thought, as it functions 
thus in actual experience, has no suspicion of the terrible 
impasse it is preparing for itself. It takes itself to be making 
a useful and intelligible distinction within experience, where 
substance and qualities are complementary and inseparable, 
as well as mutually explanatory, aspects of the same fact, with 
no hint of anything ' considered apart from its phenomena \ 
The qualities are the modes in which the substance exists 
and reveals itself; to know a thing through its qualities or 
phenomena — its modes of action — is to know the real thing 
in the only way in which God or man can know anything. 
It is only the bungling reflection of the philosopher that 
ignores the essential relativity of the two conceptions and 
substantiates the two aspects as two separate facts — the 
1 Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. i, p. 137. 2 Ibid., p. 153. 



viii THE MYTHICAL NOUMENON 163 

qualities or phenomena as known or knowable, and the 
thing-in-itself, by definition, unknown and unknowable. 
And although expressly defined as unknowable, it is still, 
it would seem, a slur upon our knowledge that we do not 
know this thing-in-itself; for that is the reason why our 
knowledge is labelled by these thinkers as ' merely rela- 
tive ', ' only of phenomena ', or, in Hamilton's phrase, a 
species of ' nescience '. But if, as I have argued, this in- 
accessible reality — the thing ' considered apart from its 
phenomena ' — is really a phantom created by a misguided 
logic, these imputations fall to the ground; and however 
limited and imperfect our knowledge may be, it is still, so 
far as it goes, a knowledge of reality. Certainly, as Kant 
says, the progress of knowledge will never discover more 
than ' fresh phenomena ' ; but phenomena are not one 
set of facts and noumena another. The phenomenon is 
the noumenon so far as it has manifested itself, so far as 
we have grasped it in knowledge. In a strict sense, it is 
not really correct to say that we know phenomena: that 
is like saying twice over that we know. It is the noumena 
or real things that we know, and phenomena are what we 
know about them. 

There can indeed be no greater absurdity than the per- 
verse reasoning which, as Hutchison Stirling puts it, adduces 
our knowledge of a thing as the proof and guarantee of our 
ignorance of it. 1 And yet on this notion is founded the usual 
agnostic travesty of metaphysics. Metaphysical philosophy 
is supposed by the ordinary agnostic critic to be engaged in 
the hopeless quest of this mythical noumenon. No wonder 
he regards it as an occupation scarcely compatible with 
sanity. As it was put with brutal frankness quite recently 
by Sir E. Ray Lankester, a doughty survivor from the wars 
of last century, ' One may regard the utmost possibilities of 
the results of human knowledge as the contents of a bracket, 

1 As regards Protoplasm, p. 71 (second edition). 



1 64 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

and place outside that bracket the factor x to represent 
those unknown and unknowable possibilities which the 
imagination of man is never wearied of suggesting. This 
factor x is the plaything of the metaphysician V It is this 
same factor x which Herbert Spencer proposed to hand over 
to religion as an object of worship. For Spencer's doctrine 
of the Unknowable rests entirely on the considerations that 
have already met us in Locke, Kant, and Hamilton. He 
formulates them in the law of the Relativity of Knowledge. 
* Thought can never express more than relations,' so that 
' from the very nature of our intelligence ' * the reality 
underlying appearances is totally and for ever inconceivable 
by us '. ' The man of science ', he tells us, ' realizes with 
a special vividness the utter incomprehensibleness of the 
simplest fact considered in itself. He, more than any other, 
truly knows that in its ultimate essence nothing can be 
known \ 2 When this transcendent mystery, which meets us 
in every particular fact, is generalized, it becomes the In- 
comprehensible Power on the acknowledgement of which 
religion is founded. ' Religion ', he admits, ' has ever been 
more or less irreligious ' in so far as * it has all along pro- 
fessed to have some knowledge of that which transcends 
knowledge '. It ' has from the first struggled to unite more 
or less science with its nescience ', but as it resigns itself en- 
tirely to nescience it will reach its legitimate goal. ' Through 
all its successive phases, the disappearance of those positive 
dogmas by which the mystery was made unmysterious, has 
formed the essential change delineated in religious history. 
And so religion has ever been approximating towards that 
complete recognition of this mystery which is its goal.' 
When that goal is reached we shall have achieved that ' per- 
manent peace ' between science and religion referred to in 
an earlier lecture. We shall ' refrain from assigning any 

1 Preface to Hugh S. R. Elliot's Modern Science and the Illusions of 
Professor Berg son. 2 First Principles, p. 67. 



viii UNKNOWABLE OR UNFATHOMABLE? 165 

attributes whatever ' to the object of our worship. We shall 
recognize it, in fine, as ' alike our highest wisdom and our 
highest duty to regard that through which all things exist 
as the Unknowable V 

Volumes, doubtless, might be written, as Spencer truly 
remarked, on the impiety of the pious; their familiarity 
with the secret counsels of the Most High makes Agnosti- 
cism seem by comparison a reverent and a reasonable 
attitude. And so it would be, if Agnosticism meant no 
more than the Biblical challenge : ' Canst thou find out the 
Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven: what 
canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know?' 
If to comprehend means to grasp, as it were, in the hand, 
to understand thoroughly, to see all round an object, then 
unquestionably the Infinite must for ever remain incom- 
prehensible by the finite. So far as Agnosticism simply 
emphasizes the unfathomableness of the universe by any 
human sounding-line, and opposes the little that we know 
to the vast unknown, it is a praiseworthy lesson in humility. 
This is really what most of the ' cloud of witnesses ', cited 
by Hamilton and Spencer, intend by their testimony — not a 
blank and total nescience, but the narrow limits of our 
insight as measured against the immensity of our ignorance. 
It is this feeling of the vast unexplored possibilities of the 
universe that mingles subtly with the conception of the 
Unknowable, and half redeems the notion in spite of itself. 
Curiously, neither Hamilton nor Spencer seems to realize 
the fundamental difference between the two conceptions, that 
of the inherently unknowable, and that of the unknown — 
the not yet known, and doubtless never by us to be fully 
known, but still the ever to be better known. Hamilton 
sums up at one point by saying that ' the grand result of 
human wisdom is thus only a consciousness that what we 
know is as nothing to what we know not ', a proposition 
1 Ibid., pp. 100-13. 



166 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

which no reasonable man would wish for a moment to deny. 
Spencer's phrases are likewise often vague enough to cover 
either meaning. Thus, when he lays it down that ' all things 
are manifestations of a Power that transcends our knowl- 
edge ', what transcends our knowledge may mean, and of 
course in Spencer's theory it ought to mean, what is absolutely 
inaccessible to our knowledge. But it may be taken quite 
as naturally to mean that which overpasses our knowledge, 
that which is inexhaustible by the finite creature ; in short, 
in the apt phrase of the Apostle * the depth of the riches of 
the wisdom and knowledge of God '. ' Inaccessible ' carries 
us back to the barren abstraction of the substance hidden 
behind its qualities. * Inexhaustible ' implies no such un- 
meaning dualism; it suggests a self-revealing Power, whose 
manifestation is limited only by the capacity of the recipient. 
The radical inconsistency of a pure Agnosticism has often 
been pointed out. Spencer's very phraseology betrays him. 
To describe as unknowable ' the Power manifested to us 
through all existence ' is a plain contradictio in adjecto, and 
yet that is his constant usage. He even tells us that ' the 
Power manifested throughout the Universe, distinguished 
as material, is the same Power which in ourselves wells up 
under the form of consciousness ', though he seeks to pre- 
serve a semblance of consistency by reminding us that 
' a conception given in phenomenal manifestations of this 
ultimate energy can in nowise show us what it is V He 
speaks in the First Principles 2 of ' the good and bad conse- 
quences which conduct brings round through the established 
order of the Unknowable ', and comments on the inability 
of most men to realize this immanent moral order, which he 
describes in the same connexion as one of the ' actions of the 
Unseen Reality '. And in the fine passage at the close of 
the chapters on the Unknowable, 3 in which he vindicates the 

1 In the essay, ' Religion, a Retrospect and Prospect,' Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, vol. xv, p. ii. 2 p. 117. 3 Ibid., p. 123. 



viii AGNOSTIC INCONSISTENCIES 167 

right of every thinker to utter what he deems the highest 
truth without hesitating lest it should be too much in advance 
of the time, he reminds his possible critics that the thinker 
himself ' with all his capacities and aspirations and beliefs 
is not an accident but a product of the time . . . and that 
his thoughts are as children born to him which he may not 
carelessly let die. He, like every other man, may properly 
consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through 
whom works the Unknown Cause ; and when the Unknown 
Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby author- 
ized to profess and act out that belief. For, to render in 
their highest sense the words of the poet — 

Nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean : so o'er that art 
Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
That nature makes.' 

We have thus a Power which manifests itself in the 
intelligible order of the material system, which wells up in 
consciousness in ourselves, which inspires man ' with all 
his capacities and aspirations and beliefs ', progressively 
guiding him to truth, and disciplining him also to goodness 
by an ' established order ' of i good and bad consequences \ 
Consequently when Spencer began to talk, in all the dignity 
of capitals, of the one absolute certainty that we are ' ever 
in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which 
all things proceed ' — when he confided to the public that 
as originally written the expression ran, ' an Infinite and 
Eternal Energy by which all things are created and sus- 
tained ', and that the last clause had been struck out in 
proof, not because it expressed more than he meant, but 
only because the ideas associated with the words might 
prove misleading — it was not surprising that sympathetically 
minded theologians began to claim him as a Theist malgre 
lui. ' I held at the outset ', he says himself, ' and continue 
to hold that this Inscrutable Existence . . . stands towards 



1 68 .POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

our general conception of things in substantially the same 
relation as does the Creative Power asserted by Theology.' 
' Everywhere I have spoken of the Unknowable as the 
Ultimate Reality — the sole existence : all things present to 
consciousness being but shows of it.' To ' the Infinite and 
Eternal Energy, manifested alike within us and without us ', 
' we must ascribe not only the manifestations themselves 
but the law of their order V Obviously such statements 
must be taken as proving, if it needed proof, that it was 
the positive elements, acknowledged or unacknowledged, 
in the conception of the Unknowable, that invested it in 
Spencer's eyes with a genuine religious halo and made 
such a Being appear to him the suitable residuary legatee 
of the religious sentiments of mankind. But as formulated 
on the basis of his perverse theory of knowledge, the 
Unknowable remains a purely negative conception. Its 
existence, we are told, is ' of all things the most certain ', 
but its nature he still obstinately declares to be ' not simply 
unknown but proved by analysis of the forms of our intelli- 
gence to be unknowable '. And in summing up his position, 
he describes the perfected religious consciousness as ' the 
consciousness of an Omnipotent Power to which no attri- 
butes can be ascribed \ 2 Could intellectual perversity go 
further, or is it possible to conceive a more gratuitous self- 
stultification? 

Some of the last quotations are drawn from Spencer's 
papers in the interesting duel with Mr. Frederic Harrison 
which enlivened the pages of the Nineteenth Century during 
the months of 1884. The duel eventually became triangular 
through the intervention of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 
who discharged the blunderbuss of a worldly common- 
sense at both combatants impartially. Mr. Harrison, who 

1 Nineteenth Century, vol. xvi, pp. 6, 24, 25. 

2 Nineteenth Century, vol. xvi, p. 838 ('Last Words on Agnosticism 
and the Religion of Humanity'). The italics in the last two quotations 
are mine. 



viii COMTIST versus AGNOSTIC 169 

came forward as the chief representative of English Positiv- 
ism, derided the idea of the Unknowable as the foundation 
of a religious creed. ' Wonder has its place in religion/ he 
said, ' and so has mystery ; but it is a subordinate place. 
The roots and fibres of religion are to be .found in love, 
awe, sympathy, gratitude, consciousness of inferiority and 
of dependence, community of will, acceptance of control, 
manifestation of purpose, reverence for majesty, goodness, 
creative energy and life. Where these are not, religion is 
not.' ' Helpless, objectless, apathetic wonder at an inscrut- 
able infinity may be attractive to a metaphysical divine; 
but it does not sound like a working force in the world.' 
' The precise and yet inexhaustible language of mathe- 
matics ', as he wittily put it, ' enables us to express, in 
a common algebraic formula, the exact combination of the 
unknown raised to its highest power of infinity. That 
formula is x°. . . . Where two or three are gathered to- 
gether to worship the Unknowable, there the algebraic 
formula may suffice to give form to their emotions : they may 
be heard to profess their unwearying belief in x n , even if no 
weak brother with ritualist tendencies be heard to cry : 

x n love us, help us, make us one with thee.' 1 

Mr. Harrison's ulterior purpose, as a good Comtist, was 
to point out the superior claims of the Religion of Humanity 
to be the religion of the future. But, as may be imagined, 
Spencer was at no loss for rejoinders very damaging to the 
mixed and ambiguous character of Mr. Harrison's deity, 
while Sir James Stephen cynically declared that ' Humanity 
with a capital H ' was neither better nor. worse fitted to be 
a god than the Unknowable with a capital U, each being 

1 a barren abstraction to which any one can attach any 
meaning he likes '. 2 A bystander, more sympathetic than 
Sir James Stephen, and with a better understanding of 

1 ' The Ghost of Religion ' (Nineteenth Century, vol. xv, pp. 494-506). 

2 Ibid., p. 910. 



170 POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM lect. 

religious feelings and motives, might have pointed out 
that the two disputants shared the truth between them, 
Mr. Harrison being right in his account (in the passage 
quoted) of the constitutive factors of religion and the 
qualities which call forth our gratitude, our reverence, and 
our love, Spencer being right, on the other hand, in insisting 
that worship cannot be accorded to anything less than the 
Perfect and the Infinite, and that Humanity, therefore, as 
a finite object developing in time, can never fill the place 
of God. 'If "veneration and gratitude" are due at all/ 
Spencer says — taking two of the emotions which Mr. Har- 
rison had mentioned as essential constituents of religion — 
' they are due to that Ultimate Cause from which Humanity, 
individually and as a whole, in common with all other things 
has proceeded. ... If we take the highest product of evolu- 
tion, civilized human society, and ask to what agency all 
its marvels must be credited, the inevitable answer is — To 
that Unknown Cause of which the entire Cosmos is a mani- 
festation. A spectator who, seeing a bubble floating on 
a great river, had his attention so absorbed by the bubble 
that he ignored the river . . . would fitly typify a disciple 
of M. Comte, who, centring all his higher sentiments on 
Humanity, holds it absurd to let either thought or feeling 
be occupied with that great stream of Creative Power, 
unlimited in Space or in Time, of which Humanity is a 
transitory product. Even if, instead of being the dull 
leaden-hued thing it is, the bubble Humanity had reached 
that stage of iridescence of which, happily, a high sample of 
man or woman sometimes shows us a beginning, it would 
still owe whatever there was in it of beauty to that Infinite 
and Eternal Energy out of which Humanity has quite 
recently emerged.' 

If this passage of Spencer's may be taken as conclusive 
against the Positivist attempt to treat Humanity as a self- 
contained fact, an Absolute on its own account — and I think 



vin TWO HALF-TRUTHS 171 

it is conclusive — surely it is equally conclusive (although 
Spencer himself will not see it so) against his own cherished 
doctrine of the unknowability of the ultimate Cause. For 
the whole process of human evolution is here unequivocally 
treated as the active self-manifestation of the principle of the 
Whole. And so the worship of Humanity and the worship 
of the Unknowable, each untenable in itself, are seen both to 
owe their vitality, as we might have surmised, to the partial 
and complementary truths which they respectively enshrine. 
And these truths are only kept apart by a distorted con- 
ception of the relation of reality to its appearances. 



LECTURE IX 

IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM 

The greater part of the last lecture was devoted to an 
analysis of the fallacy which seems to me to underlie philo- 
sophical agnosticism, and, in particular, to Spencer's well- 
known application to religion of the sheer disjunction between 
reality and its appearances. The result of this disjunction 
is necessarily to leave the one member of it a blank ab- 
straction, to which, as Spencer truly says, ' no attributes can 
be ascribed; ' for if the qualitative nature of the manifesta- 
tion throws no light on that which is manifested, the latter 
remains simply the bare fact of an existent somewhat. It 
is, in short, the old notion of substance as a support of 
accidents or as the bare point of existence to which the 
qualities are somehow attached. This comes out so plainly 
in Spencer's presentation of the agnostic position that it 
will be worth our while, before passing from the subject, 
to advert to another line of reflection by which he supports 
his conclusion. It is significant that he so frequently tells us 
that, while we can neither know nor conceive the nature 
of the Power manifested through phenomena, the exist- 
ence of that Power is of all things the most certain. Thus 
in the chapter on ' The Relativity of all Knowledge V 
where he expressly defends (against theorists who bid us 
' rest wholly in the consciousness of phenomena') the 
existence of a positive consciousness of the Absolute or 
Unconditioned, he insists that ' in the very denial of our 
power to learn what the Absolute is, there lies hidden the 
assumption that it is. . . . It is rigorously impossible to con- 
ceive that our knowledge is a knowledge of Appearances 
1 First Principles, Part I, chap. iv. 



ix THE MYSTERY OF ' BEING ' 173 

only, without at the same time conceiving a Reality of 
which they are appearances ; for appearance without reality 
is unthinkable. . . . Clearly, then, the very demonstration 
that a definite consciousness of the Absolute is impossible 
to us, unavoidably presupposes an indefinite consciousness 
of it. . . . The sense of a something which is conditioned in 
every thought cannot be got rid of.' He describes it as 
' an indefinite notion of general existence, ... an indefinite 
consciousness of something constant under all modes — of 
being apart from its appearances '. It is, accordingly, this 
notion of ' being ' or of ' something ' which Spencer has in 
view when he talks in another chapter of ' the utter incom- 
prehensibleness of the simplest fact, considered in itself ', 
and tells us that ' in its ultimate essence nothing can be 
known \ The ultimate essence is just the being of the thing, 
the ' that ' of it as opposed to the ' what ' — its existence as 
distinguished from its nature. The statement is, indeed, so 
paraphrased by a disciple : all things, he tells us, are ' in their 
essence unknowable, that is, in their reality as resting in what 
is. . . . Precisely that relation to the oneness of Being by 
which alone they are at all is neither known nor knowable.' 1 
Now there is a sense in which Being may be described 
as an ultimate and abysmal mystery. It is the sense which 
fascinated Parmenides and Spinoza and many of the mystic 
theologians. Von Hartmann speaks 2 of the ability to 
appreciate the problem of mere Being, or, as he calls it, of 
groundless subsistence, as the true touchstone of meta- 
physical talent. ' If nothing at all existed,' he says, ' no 
world, no process, no substance, and also, of course, no one 
to indulge in philosophic wonder, there would be nothing 
wonderful in that — it would be eminently natural and 



1 J. Allanson Picton, Religion of the Universe, pp. 55-7. The book is 
inscribed ' To the Memory of Herbert Spencer, the first true reconciler 
of Religion and Science '. 

2 Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. iii, p. 196 (English translation). 



174 IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM lect. 

there would be no problem to solve.' But, that anything 
at all exists, or how the somewhat on which everything 
else depends comes to exist — this is so unfathomably 
mysterious, that when the question is once realized 
it eclipses all possible wonder at the detailed nature of the 
universe which thus exists. But if this be, as Hartmann 
calls it, the problem of problems before which we become 
rigid as before a Gorgon's head, it is obvious that it is, as 
he says, inherently insoluble — whether the metaphysician 
be human or divine. It is fruitless, if not absurd, to inquire, 
in Lotze's quaint phrase, ' how being is made,' how there 
comes to be anything at all. Even a divine metaphysician 
must start from the fact of his own existence; and we, as 
philosophers, have not to create the universe or to explain 
why there should be a universe at all, but to find out what 
kind of a universe it is. It becomes quite misleading, 
therefore, to speak as if we were cut off from a knowledge 
of the essence of things, because we have to take their 
existence for granted. From this point of view, there is 
nothing mysterious or unfathomable at all about being : 
there is nothing more to know about it than just * being ', or, 
as Spencer dilutes the term, ' the sense of a something ' or 
* an indefinite notion of general existence '. It is the 
beginning of knowledge, not its ultimate and transcendent 
goal. The task of knowledge, philosophical as well as 
scientific, is to make this indefinite consciousness definite, 
to discover what kind of a something it is that we have to 
deal with. But the agnostic way of putting it converts 
the mere ' that ' — the fact of the thing's existence — into 
a profounder kind of ' what ', and declares this to be un- 
knowable. For such a procedure there is no justification 
either in the case of an individual thing or in the case of 
the Absolute. Of the Absolute it has been finely said, ' its 
predicates are the worlds V We Team its nature through 
1 Laurie, Synthetica, vol. ii, p. 88. 



ix THE IMMANENT GOD 175 

the facts of the universe, especially so far as any system or 
scale of values is discernible in them. This is the immanent 
God on our knowledge of whom it has been the purpose of 
this first course of lectures to insist. 

The nature of ultimate Reality is to be read, therefore, in 
its manifestation, and may be read there truly. We may be 
sure the revelation is not exhaustive, for all revelation must 
be ad modum recipientis ; it must be proportionate to the 
capacity of the receiving mind. Every advance in knowledge, 
or in goodness, or in the intuitions of beauty and grandeur 
offered us in nature or in art, is a further revelation of the 
heights and depths of the divine nature. From this point 
of view the very notion of development is progressive 
initiation. ' I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye 
cannot bear them now.' And if this is true within the his- 
torical development of mankind in the past, it is reasonable 
to suppose that the record is not closed at the present stage 
of attainment. Every creature, says Nietzsche, has paved 
the way for something higher ; man is but a transition figure, 
1 a rope,' as he calls it, between the beast and the superman of 
the future. In a nobler sense than he himself applies it, we 
may accept the idea of the more godlike man that is to be — 
just as we may give rein to our imagination and suppose 
such larger intelligences existing now in worlds beyond our 
ken. But all such acknowledgements alter nothing as to the 
attitude of the knower and the mode in which his knowledge 
is obtained. The most exalted intelligence must read, as 
we do, in the volume of God's works, to learn His nature: 
his knowledge, like ours, is through the manifestation. 
Though it may be truer in the sense of being ampler and 
more adequate, and so correcting errors and solving diffi- 
culties incident to our more limited range of vision, this is 
but a difference of degree, not a qualitative distinction be- 
tween absolute and relative, as if the one knowledge were 
true and the other vitiated bv some inherent defect. Our 



176 IDEALISM AND PAN-PS YCHISM lect. 

knowledge is as true for us as the ampler knowledge for the 
higher being. Each is true as being an interpretation of the 
facts accessible at that particular stage. With new data 
comes new insight ; but the new insight carries forward and 
incorporates the old — it does not abolish it. 

That being so, it has been the contention of these lectures 
that everything depends upon our keeping in view the whole 
range of accessible facts, if we are to form a true idea of the 
nature of the system as a whole, and consequently of the 
nature of the Being whom it reveals. We began by accept- 
ing Hume's challenge : * Whence can any cause be known 
but from the known effects? Whence can any hypothesis 
be established but from the apparent phenomena ? ' But we 
demurred to his own limitation of the argument to ' a con- 
templation of the works of nature ', i. e., to the structure and 
arrangements of the external world. Hume himself speaks 
of ' living existences ' as ' the only beings worth regarding ' 
when it comes to a final judgement on the nature of the 
universe. 1 The ultimate Power * wells up f as Spencer 
phrases it, in man, the knower, no less than in the objects he 
contemplates, and not only in man as knower, but in all the 
aspects of human life. It seemed to us, accordingly, that, 
instead of being excluded from consideration, the charac- 
teristics of human consciousness and human development 
must be the most significant of all facts for the solution of 
our question. We saw how Kant gave this central signifi- 
cance to man's ethical experience. But all through our dis- 
cussion we have had to struggle against the tendency to treat 
the world of nature as a fact complete in itself, a system fin- 
ished without man. This tendency appeared in very differ- 
ent forms, sometimes reducing consciousness to an inactive 
accompaniment of material processes going on by themselves, 
at other times, as in the Positivist theory, making man his 
own creator, so far as the distinctively human virtues and 
1 Dialogues, Part XI. 



ix GENERAL CONCLUSION REACHED 177 

excellences are concerned. I have insisted, on the contrary, 
that to do this is to convert abstractions into realities by 
separating what is given together and cannot be conceived 
apart. Man is organic to nature, and nature is organic to 
man. It is a false abstraction to try to take the world apart 
from the central fact in which it so obviously finds expres- 
sion. So taken, it is like a broken arch or, in Laurie's figure, 
a circle unclosed; there is no system, no whole of being, no 
real fact at all, till the external gathers itself up, as it were, 
into internality, and existence sums itself in the conscious 
soul. And this way of talking in terms of a time-process, 
common and natural as it is, should not mislead us into 
thinking that the external ever existed as a mere external, 
before it internalized itself — as if the body of the universe 
existed, so to speak, like an empty case waiting for a soul. 
The metaphorical language in which Lotze, not to mention 
Hegel and others, speaks of nature as striving towards self- 
expression and rising, as it were, stage by stage towards its 
self -completion in mind, is clearly not intended as the record 
of an historical progress. Such expressions are an analysis 
of ideal stages or ' moments ', as idealistic writers are fond of 
calling them, aspects of one total fact, which can only be 
known truly as a whole or system. Hence I was at pains to 
insist that questions of the apparent historical genesis of the 
higher or more complex from the lower or simpler have no 
philosophical importance or relevance, seeing that, philo- 
sophically considered, the lower or simpler phases are not 
independent facts existing as a prius, but abstract aspects of 
a single fact, which is fully expressible only in terms of self- 
conscious experience. 

So far our argument may claim to have been continuous 
and to have reached a definite, if still very general, con- 
clusion. I will not attempt to carry the argument further 
within the limits of the present course. I will try instead to 



178 IDEALISM AND PAN-PS YCHISM lect. 

render the nature of our conclusion more precise by differen- 
tiating it from theories which it may seem to resemble, and 
by the refutation of which it is frequently supposed to be 
overthrown. It is specially important at the present time 
to disentangle the position from its supposed dependence on 
the questionable or more than questionable arguments by 
which those other theories are supported; and in what 
follows we shall have in view, in the first place, the strong 
trend of speculation in certain quarters at the present 
day in the direction of Pan-psychism, and, in the second 
place, the active contemporary propaganda in support of 
Realism. 

Our doctrine, as we have built it up, may be focused in 
the saying that man (or mind) is organic to nature. The 
very phrase, it may be pointed out, implies the comple- 
mentary truth of nature as organic to man, nature as the 
essential condition of finite mind. Internality is impossible 
without externality; a subject or a self would be an empty 
form, if it had not a world to draw on for its filling. Just 
as every living centre has its environment, which furnishes 
it with the material which it transmutes and builds into 
the fabric of its own life — so that it is only through its 
environment that it lives at all — so, still more obviously, 
the self of knowledge and action could have nothing either 
to know or to do, apart from the natural and social world of 
which it is at once the consciousness and the active organ. 
The world of nature and the world of social relations founded 
upon it constitute, as it were, the condition of individuation. 
And in emphatically repudiating the mechanistic scheme 
of physical science as a self-existent, underlying reality, of 
which everything else is the inexplicable outcome, a spiritual 
philosophy which is sure of itself feels no temptation to deny 
or to minimize the mechanical aspects of the cosmos on 
which its higher life reposes. On the contrary, nature, as a 
realm of inviolable law, appears, so far as we can see, to be 



ix MONADISM 179 

the necessary condition of the life of intelligence and reason- 
able action. Nevertheless, a revulsion from the conclusions 
of the lower Naturalism has led a number of idealistic think- 
ers at the present day to seek to turn the tables upon Natural- 
ism by resolving the universe without remainder into an 
assemblage of subjective centres of existence, and thus abol- 
ishing altogether the conception of nature in the ordinary 
sense of the term. On the ordinary view, nature provides 
the theatre, the scenery, and properties for the spiritual 
drama. The system of nature seems, as I have suggested, to 
furnish at once the conditions of individuation and the 
means of communication between individuals. But, on this 
monadistic theory, the organic vesture of the spirit and its 
environmental conditions are both resolved into innumerable 
quasi-spiritual centres; and the objective world becomes 
simply the appearance of these souls or monads to one an- 
other. The classical type of this theory is the Monadology 
of Leibnitz, and its recent advocates have not greatly de- 
parted from or improved upon his exposition. 

The thought-motives of the theory are fairly obvious. It 
seems to furnish the most crushing reply conceivable to 
materialism by spiritualizing the universe to its tiniest par- 
ticle. The principle of continuity also seems to lend it pow- 
erful support ; and this is, in fact, the principle on which 
the theory is mainly based by Leibnitz and most of his fol- 
lowers. Our own existence, as we immediately experience 
it, gives us our pied-a-terre, the living instance from which 
we start. We habitually assume that the lower animals exist 
as similar centres of feeling and striving; they are conscious, 
although not possessing the self-consciousness that comes 
with the conceptual reason. As we descend in the animal 
scale to the lowest organic forms, we still imagine some de- 
gree of this consciousness to remain — some faint analogue 
of our own self-centred life, though we may hesitate to speak 
of it even as consciousness and may invoke the convenient 



180 IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM lect. 

term subconsciousness to describe it — a vague, diffused, un- 
differentiated feeling, conceived as the impulsive basis of 
action, seeing that feeling and activity are for psychology 
two inseparable aspects of a single fact. And when we once 
surrender ourselves to the principle of continuity, why 
should we stop at the confines of the animal kingdom, or 
why should we limit such considerations to the case of the 
organism as a whole? Modern psychology is on the track 
of many obscure phenomena which suggest the idea of sub- 
ordinate centres of experience and memory besides the cen- 
tral and normal consciousness based upon the cortical centres 
in the brain. Speculative biologists have extended this idea, 
and would treat each living cell as in some degree conscious 
or quasi-conscious, explaining thereby its selective action and 
general behaviour. And again, why stop at the living cell ? 
The affinities, as they are called, of chemical atoms and 
molecules seem to exhibit the same characteristics of action 
from within — some analogue of selection or choice. And 
the matter of the physicist only seems to us dead and inert 
because we ordinarily view it in the mass. But science 
resolves the passive lump of extended matter into a mazy 
dance of invisible particles, if not into sheerly ideal centres of 
force. Hence the atom, or whatever lies behind the atom, 
as the ultimate term of physical science, is itself conceived 
by the Monadist as psychical in essence, a feeling and respon- 
sive centre after the analogy of our own existence, in how- 
ever remote a degree. And thus we arrive at the view 
expressed by Leibnitz in a well-known passage : ' Each por- 
tion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, but is also 
actually subdivided without end. . . . Whence it appears 
that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of 
creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each 
portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of 
plants or like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every 
plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid 



ix THE ATOMIC SOUL 181 

parts is also some such garden or pond. . . . Thus there is 
nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, 
no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it 
might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one 
would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming 
of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the 
fish themselves.' 1 

Sometimes in contemporary writers the theory of an 
atomic soul appears as a blundering attempt to throw the 
glamour of Idealism over a purely materialistic position. 
So it is, for example, in Haeckel, who seems to think he has 
solved the ' Riddle of the Universe ' by allowing each atom 
' a rudimentary form of sensation and will, or, as it is better 
expressed, of feeling (aesthesis) and inclination (tropesis)'. 2 
But things are not changed by giving them Greek names, nor 
is the philosophical position altered by infusing, as it were, 
into each occurrence a drop of consciousness. Idealism 
means essentially the interpretation of the world according 
to a scale of value, or, in Plato's phrase, by the Idea of the 
Good or the Best. The addition of consciousness to every- 
thing as its inner side, a running accompaniment, which 
makes no difference — this favourite idea of popular scientific 
Monism is a complete philosophical cul-de-sac. The philo- 
sophical interest of consciousness lies in the ideal values of 
which it is, so to say, the bearer, not in its mere existence 
as a more refined kind of fact. One has heard of people 
who treated the ether as a half-way house between matter 
and thought, and this way of treating consciousness shows 
much the same habit of mind. 

In other quarters, Pan-psychism is adopted as a way of 
escape from difficulties in the theory of knowledge. Thus 
Clifford escapes from Subjective Idealism by a distinction 
between the object, which he takes to be a subjective modifi- 

1 Monadology, sections 65-9. 

2 Riddle of the Universe, chap. xii. 



182 IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM lect. 

cation in the knowing mind, and the eject or extra-mental 
reality which these conscious states symbolize. The typical 
ejects which we all recognize are the minds or consciousnesses 
of our fellow-men; and on that analogy Clifford concludes 
that ejects (or things-in-themselves, as he also calls them) 
are always psychical in character. He does not, indeed, 
place a mind or unitary consciousness behind every material 
particle; but, since mind may be regarded as a complex, of 
which simple feelings are the elements, he supposes these 
elements to exist independently, and by subsequent com- 
bination to give rise to the faint beginnings of sentience in 
a low organism, and eventually, in more complex combina- 
tions, to the phenomena of human consciousness. 'A mov- 
ing molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind 
or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind- 
stuff. When molecules are so combined together as to form 
the film on the under side of a jelly-fish, the elements of 
mind-stuff which go along with them are so combined as to 
form the faint beginnings of Sentience. When the molecules 
are so combined as to form the brain and nervous system of 
a vertebrate, the corresponding elements of mind-stuff are 
so combined as to form some kind of consciousness. . . . 
When matter takes the complex form of a human brain, the 
corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human con- 
sciousness, having intelligence and volition.' ' Mind-stuff 
is then the reality which we perceive as matter.' x 

The idea of small pieces of unconscious mind-stuff com- 
bining independently into minds is, I take it, a ' psycho- 
logical monster ' of the most impossible type. But that 
peculiar feature of Clifford's theory has no special relevance 
in the present connexion. The theory is quoted simply as 
an example of the difficulty which is widely felt in taking 
material things, as we perceive them, to be realities existing 

1 Lectures and Essays, vol. ii, p. 85 : Essay ' On the Nature of Things- 
in-themselves \ 



ix SPOXTAXEITY AND FREEDOM 183 

in their own right. This is a genuine difficulty. It is the 
nerve of Berkeley's criticism of Locke's ' stupid thoughtless 
somewhat'; and unless we are satisfied, like Berkeley, to 
treat the material world as a system of signs, which have no 
existence save as intermittent experiences in the minds of 
individual knowers and as a continuous divine purpose of 
acting according to certain rules, the alternative seems to be 
that of the Pan-psychists, namely, to place behind each 
material appearance a mental counterpart or monadic soul. 
But this philosophical animism is in the end, I propose to 
argue, too primitively simple an expedient, and it is a theory 
difficult to reconcile with our common-sense attitude towards 
natural things. 

But perhaps the most important motive underlying 
Monadism still remains to be mentioned. By its most 
recent advocates, Monadism appears to be regarded as a 
way of escape from the complete determinism with which 
the mechanistic scheme seems to threaten human life. 
Inasmuch as it treats feeling and striving — that is to say, 
the fundamental characteristics of conscious life — as the 
primary fact in the universe, it makes the idea of law 
derivative from that of activity. This is the form in which 
the theory meets us in Professor Ward's recent Giflord 
Lectures on Pluralism and Theism. Professor Ward pre- 
sents it, in the first instance, as developed by those whom he 
calls Pluralists, some of whom might also be described as 
Pragmatists ; but, so far as I am able to judge, he accepts the 
main position as his own. On this view, then, we do not 
start with an established order, a reign of law, or system of 
conditions within which purposive action (and all action) 
takes place. Pluralism, we are told, 1 ' attempts to get 
behind all this ' ; it ' undertakes to explain how this orderli- 
ness has itself been developed '. The fixed laws and stable 
arrangements of the world have been gradually evolved, 

1 Cf. The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism, pp 67-9. 



184 IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM lect. 

it is contended, as a result of the behaviour to one another 
of the active individuals which ultimately compose the 
universe. They represent the result, that is to say, of the 
action and reaction of these psychical individua in their 
struggle for the best modus vivendi. 1 Professor Ward ap- 
plies here the idea, so prominent in his own * Psychology ', 
of habits and automatisms as essentially secondary forma- 
tions — deposits, so to speak, of actions originally due to 
subjective selection. This idea is, of course, both true and 
fruitful, as commonly applied in psychology and biology. 
But extending the conception beyond the usual psychologi- 
cal and biological limits, Professor Ward seems to accept, 
or at least seriously to entertain, the statement which he 
quotes from C. S. Peirce that ' matter is effete mind, in- 
veterate habits becoming physical laws \ He speaks re- 
peatedly of nature in this sense as ' plastic ', and adapts 
the old scholastic distinction of natura naturata and natura 
naturans to express his meaning. ' What is done, natura 
naturata — the decisions made, the habits formed, the cus- 
toms fixed — constitutes at any stage the routine, the general 
trend of things, within which future possibilities lie. What 
is still to do, natura naturans, implies further spontaneity 
and growth — new decisions to be taken, fresh experiments 
to be made, with their usual sequel of trial and error and 
possible eventual success/ 

But in the attempt to derive all laws from previous 
actions, this ultra-pragmatism appears to overleap itself; 
for surely the very consolidation of actions into habits 
depends upon the pre-existence of a stable system of con- 
ditions. What meaning can we attach to actions in 
abstract o, apart from any environment? The laudable de- 
sire to save spontaneity and freedom seems, by denying 
necessity altogether, to fall into the other extreme of pure 
chance. It would obviously be unfair to make Professor 
1 The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism, p. 80. 



ix PURE CHANCE 185 

Ward responsible for everything that Mr. Peirce may say, 
but some of the passages in the article from which the 
above quotation was taken, 1 and in particular its conclusion, 
are too remarkable to be passed over without notice. 
' Law ', says Mr. Peirce, ' is par excellence the thing that 
wants a reason ' ; and so he sets about ' accounting for the 
laws of nature and for uniformity in general \ i. e. for the 
fact of law or order at all. The only possible way of account- 
ing for them, he proceeds, is ' to suppose them results of 
evolution ' ; and he adds that * this supposes them not to 
be absolute, not to be obeyed precisely. It makes an ele- 
ment of indeterminacy, spontaneity or absolute chance in 
nature/ And the article concludes with this startling picture 
of the way in which we may conceive the generation of 
law and order, the growth of cosmos out of chaos : * In 
the beginning, infinitely remote,' we may suppose, ' there 
was a chaos of unpersonalised feeling which, being without 
connection or regularity, would properly be without exist- 
; ence. 2 This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbi- 
/ trariness, would have started the germ of a generalising 
tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this 
would have a growing virtue. Thus the tendency to habit 
would be started; and from this, with the other principles 
of evolution, all the regularities of the universe would be 
evolved. At any time, however, an element of pure chance 
survives, and will remain until the world becomes an 
absolutely perfect, rational and symmetrical system, in 
which mind is at last crystallised in the infinitely distant 
future/ 

I will not trust myself to characterize this extraordinary 
attempt to evolve out of pure chaos the very conditions of 



1 ' The Architectonic of Theories ' in the Monist, January 1891, vol. i, 
p. 161 et seq. 

2 What this means I confess I do not understand; presumably it de- 
pends on some idiosyncrasy in Mr. Peirce's terminology. 



186 IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM lect. 

evolution itself. I should not have thought it worth men- 
tioning, indeed, but for Professor Ward's approving quota- 
tion from the article. Professor Ward himself, it is fair to 
say, while he notes that certain pluralists, ill-advised, as 
he deems them, have not hesitated to draw this conclusion 
of absolute contingency, and have even proposed the term 
' Tychism ' to describe their doctrine, denies the start 
with chaos, and introduces a distinction between what he 
calls the contingency of chance and the contingency of free- 
dom. 1 But so long as he maintains the foregoing account 
of the origin of physical law, it is difficult to see how he 
can logically escape the consequences which he repudiates. 
And one cannot forget that Professor Ward, both in his 
earlier course of Gifford Lectures and in this one, has lent 
his countenance to the idea of contingency, by represent- 
ing the uniformity of natural law as comparable to that 
of a statistical average, which gives results that are con- 
stant for large aggregates but cover an indefinite amount of 
variation in individual cases. Statistical results, as he puts 
it in his recent volume 2 , ' frequently hide the diversity and 
spontaneity of animated beings when they and their actions 
are taken en masse. This diversity and spontaneity ' (he 
adds) 'are held to be fundamental: and the orderliness 
and regularity we now observe, to be the result of conduct, 
not its presupposition.' But, at the atomic level contem- 
plated, it is difficult to see what scope there is for spon- 
taneity, unless it is taken to mean a power of reacting 
differently in identical circumstances; for a different mode 
of reaction to a different stimulus is just what is implied 
in the idea of law which it is sought to repudiate or get 
behind. Professor Bosanquet, who traverses this whole 
line of argument, points out that relevancy, rather than 
uniformity, is the proper designation of the scientific postu- 

1 Realm of Ends, p. 454. Cf . Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii, p. 281. 

2 Realm of Ends, p. 433. 



ix RELEVANCY, NOT UNIFORMITY 187 

late of law, i. e. appropriate reaction, remaining the same 
doubtless when the circumstances are the same, but vary- 
ing with every change of circumstance — the principle, in 
short, that ' for every difference there must be a reason \ 
So that fineness of adjustment, precision and relevancy of 
determinate response, should mean at once the perfection 
of the living intelligence and the completest realization of 
law. To take spontaneity in any other sense ' sets us wrong 
ab initio in our attitude to the characteristics of conscious- 
ness, teaching us to connect it with eccentricity and caprice 
instead of with system and rationality \ l The argument 
from statistics seems intended to prove that the uniformity 
on the whole which appears in physical movements is a 
mere average, each individual movement being due to the 
1 spontaneity ' of the individual particle and varying pos- 
sibly in one direction or the other, and in greater or less 
degree, from the mean which the law formulates. But 
what is gained for the cause of spiritual freedom by endow- 
ing particles with a spontaneity of this kind, it is not easy 
to see. Action cannot be intelligibly considered apart from 
the ideas of stimulus and response, and when it is so con- 
sidered, spontaneity can only mean unhampered response 
according to the joint nature of the interacting factors. 
The idea of spontaneity in the abstract, apart from such 
a reference, must reduce itself to sheer wilfulness, and lead 
us back to Peirce's conception of ' feeling sporting here and 
there in pure arbitrariness '. A system of unvarying natural 
order is demanded, it may be pointed out, in the service of 
the higher conscious life itself as the condition of reason- 
able action. It is instructive, for example, to observe 
Hume complaining of the pains and hardships which come 
to individuals from * the conducting of the world by general 
laws ' and admitting in the same breath that ' if every- 
thing were conducted by particular volitions, the course of 

1 Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 94. 



188 IDEALISM AND PAN-PSYCHISM lect. 

nature would be perpetually broken, and no man could 
employ his reason in the conduct of life V 

Much the same criticism applies to the general theory 
of Monadism, if carried to its logical conclusion. What 
are we to make of those monads towards the lower limit, 
those bare or naked monads, as Leibnitz called them, which 
.are simply a mens momentanea, without memory or the 
power of profiting by experience, and which therefore can 
only react immediately and to what is immediately given? 
If, in Professor Ward's words, they are * beings which have 
only external relations to one another, or rather for which 
as the limit of our regress, the distinction of internal and 
external ceases to hold ', how does their behaviour to one 
another differ from a case of mechanical interaction as 
ordinarily understood? And if the two are indistinguish- 
able, what is the use of the monadistic construction? 
Might we not as well have accepted the realm of physical 
law to begin with, as the substructure of the spiritual, 
and, so far as we can see, the necessary presupposition of 
individual experience? On the hypothesis of Pan-psychism, 
it has been said, 2 ' what becomes of the material incidents 
of life — of our food, our clothes, our country, our bodies? 
Is it not obvious that our relation to these things is essential 
to finite being, and that if they are in addition subjective 
psychical centres their subjective psychical quality is one 
which, so far as realized, would destroy their function and 
character for us ? ' In other words, it is as things, as exter- 
nalities, that they function in our life, not as other selves; 
if we had to treat them as other selves, their characteristic 
being would disappear. We conclude, therefore, that ab- 
solutely nothing is gained, and much confusion is intro- 
duced, by resolving external nature into an aggregate of 
tiny minds or, still worse, of * small pieces of mind-stuff \ 

1 Dialogues, Part II. 

2 Bosanquet, Individuality and Value, p. 363. Cf. p. 194. 



ix A CONFLICT WITH COMMON SENSE 189 

It is sufficient for the purposes of Idealism that nature as 
a whole should be recognized as complementary to mind, 
and possessing therefore no absolute existence of its own 
apart from its spiritual completion; just as mind in turn 
would be intellectually and ethically void without a world 
to furnish it with the materials of knowledge and of duty. 
Both are necessary elements of a single system. 1 



1 See Supplementary Note A to Second Edition, p. 419. 



LECTURE X 

IDEALISM AND MENTALISM 

A further point requires elucidation. The conclusion 
we have reached — the doctrine of the self-conscious life as 
organic to the world or of the world as finding completion 
and expression in that life, so that the universe, as a com- 
plete or self-existent fact, is statable only in terms of mind — 
this is the doctrine historically known as Idealism, some- 
times described in recent discussion as objective, tran- 
scendental or absolute Idealism, according to its historical 
origin and colouring or the special emphasis of the con- 
troversy. /But Idealism also means historically the doctrine 
that the being of things is dependent on their being known 
— the familiar Berkeleian doctrine that esse is percipi, or, 
as some later transcendentalists have modified it, that 
esse is intelligi — which yields directly Berkeley's further 
position that the existence of unthinking things is a con- 
tradiction in terms, and therefore, as he puts it, ' nothing 
properly but Persons, i.e. conscious things, do exist. All other 
things are not so much existences as manners of the exis- 
tence of persons \ 1 This position, in the typical form 
given to it by Berkeley, is more specifically known as Sub- 
jective Idealism, but the fundamental argument on which 
it is based — the dependence of being on being known — re- 

*In the Commonplace Book, Works, Vol. I, p. 59 (Fraser's edition 
of 1901). Cf. Mr. Bradley's statements (Appearance and Reality, p. 
144) : ' We perceive, on reflection, that to be real, or even barely to 
exist, must be to fall within sentience. Sentient experience, in short, 
is reality, and what is not this is not real. . . . Feeling, thought, and 
volition ... are all the material for existence.' Professor Taylor 
uses similar language in his Elements of Metaphysics, p. 347 : ' We are 
already agreed that reality is exclusively composed of psychical fact.' 
But see Supplementary Note B., p. 420. 



x MENTALISM versus REALISM 191 

mains the same in those transcendental theories which 
endeavour to avoid the private or individualistic character 
of Berkeley's doctrine by bringing in an All-Knower to 
maintain in existence the world of objects which we recog- 
nize in common, and which we usually think of as existing 
quite irrespective of whether they are known or not known. 
For this characteristic position the term Mentalism, which 
we appear to owe to the late Professor Sidgwick, 1 would 
seem to be a more appropriate name than the overdriven 
and many-coloured term Idealism, and I propose to use 
it consistently in that sense throughout the present lecture. 
Mentalism, in its older form, was the object of Thomas 
Reid's attack in this very University of Aberdeen a century 
and a half ago; and it is matter of common knowledge that 
the opening years of the twentieth century have been 
marked, on both sides of the Atlantic, by a strong attack 
on the fundamental tenet of Mentalism on the part of 
thinkers who call themselves Realists or Neo-Realists. Into 
the whole of this controversy it would be impossible, as 
well as hardly relevant, to enter here. But I feel it to be 
important, if misconception is to be avoided, to free the 
position I am defending from any supposed dependence on 
the Mentalistic doctrines which have often been used to 
support it, but which I agree with the Realists in considering 
untenable. 

First, then, we must admit that the argument so per- 
suasively stated by Berkeley is essentially circular. We 
cannot conceive the existence of material things apart from 

1 In his posthumous lectures on Philosophy, its Scope and Relations, 
Sidgwick extends the scope of the term so as to include not only Sensa- 
tionalists and Idealists (whom he calls Pure Mentalists), but also Phe- 
nomenalists or Relativists, who do not deny the existence of matter in- 
dependently of mind, but hold that we can have no knowledge of it as so 
existing. See pp. 61-2. The term is not to be found in Baldwin's Dic- 
tionary of Philosophy, but I note that Professor Bosanquet has recently 
employed it in his Adamson Lecture on The Distinction between Mind 
and its Objects (1913). 



192 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM lect. 

f 
a mind which perceives or knows them, because, as Berkeley 
himself puts it, we are trying to ' conceive them existing un- 
conceived or unthought of ', which is a plain contradiction. 
The mind in the attempt inevitably introduces itself, but, 
' taking no notice of itself ', fails to observe that it has 
vitiated the experiment. This is what an American Realist, 
in a phrase worthy of Kant, in its full-flavoured technicality, 
has dubbed ' the ego-centric predicament \ The Ego is the 
centre of its own world, the presupposition of all its knowl- 
edge; it is impossible, in the nature of the case, to extrude 
it. But that of itself decides nothing as to the existence of 
things before or after they were known, and apart from the 
effort to conceive them. Berkeley proves that they cannot 
exist in the knowledge relation without implying a mind or 
ego, and also that we cannot say anything about them except 
as known, so that out of that relation they are to us, in 
a Kantian phrase, as good as nothing at all. But this 
method of approach cannot possibly prove that they do not 
exist out of that relation; it cannot prove Berkeley's thesis 
that being-in-that-relation constitutes their existence. On 
the contrary, we should all say, prima facie, that being 
known makes no difference to the existence of anything real. 
The Mentalist will no doubt admit, as Berkeley himself 
does, that things known have an obvious independence of the 
individual subject; but he will still insist that their being 
consists in their presence to a universal consciousness, an 
All-Knower, who, by knowing them, maintains them, so to 
speak, in existence. This is, more particularly, the tran- 
scendental variety of Mentalism. But if knowledge has the 
same meaning in the two cases, the existence of a thing can 
no more depend on God's knowing it than on my knowing it. 
And hence it will be noticed that most versions of this theory, 
in speaking of the universal Knower, introduce phrases 
like a creative consciousness, a perceptive understanding 
which originates the matter as well as the form of its objects, 



x THE UNIVERSAL KNOWER 193 

and so forth. But in so doing they entirely alter the condi- 
tions. No doubt the phrases used are exceedingly obscure, 
and not always consistently applied; but the general impli- 
cation is that the creative subject conveys into the object 
something of his own being. Sometimes the process is 
described as a self-externalization or outering of itself on the 
part of the subject. But however it may be described, it 
is this act which, as it were, supplies the object to be known : 
it is not the knowing, as such, that constitutes or makes the 
object. The change in phraseology is, in short, a tacit 
acknowledgement of the principle that in every case knowl- 
edge presupposes a reality, which it knows but does not 
make. 1 

But the point for us is that this transcendental idealism 
is just Berkeleian idealism in excelsis, Berkeleianism uni- 
versalized and applied on the cosmic scale ; and the reasoning 
is, therefore, of the same circular character. This may be 
very clearly seen in Ferrier's philosophy, which is perhaps 
the clearest statement of this form of idealism. Ferrier ex- 
pressly recognizes Berkeley as ' the first to swell the current 
of that mighty stream of tendency towards which all modern 
meditation flows, the great gulf stream of Absolute Ideal- 
ism ' ; and in his own theory he claims to present Berkeley's 
principle purged of Berkeley's sensationalism. Accordingly 
the central propositions of his Institutes all turn on ' the 
inseparability of the objective and the subjective ', that is, 
on the necessary presence of the subject in every act of 

1 Berkeley also has recourse to God, in a more naive way, to account 
for the persistence of objects in the intervals of finite percipience and, in 
general, for the permanence and order of the material world. But it will 
be remembered that he gives no account of the mode in which sensible 
objects are present to the divine consciousness; this apparently occurred 
to him as a difficulty after his chief works were written, for he touches 
upon it in Siris. In general, he treats our sense-experience simply as an 
effect of the divine will, and this may perhaps be taken as another way 
of acknowledging that more than knowledge is implied in the constitu- 
tion of any reality. 



194 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM lect. 

knowledge. ' Object plus subject is the absolute in cogni- 
tion,' the unit in knowledge; 'matter mecum/ he other- 
wise expresses it, ' thoughts or mental states together with 
the self or subject.' 1 Matter per se (and the same applies to 
an Ego per se) thus * lapses into a contradiction; it becomes 
a mere absurdity ' ; 'it is not simply the inconceivable by 
us, but the absolutely inconceivable in itself.' And the con- 
clusion thus based upon the analysis of knowledge in the 
first part of the work (the Epistemology) is translated in the 
third part into an Ontology or theory of Being : 'Absolute 
existence is the synthesis of the subject and the object . . . 
the concentration of the Ego and non-ego; in other words, 
the only true and real and independent existences are minds- 
together-with-that-which-they-apprehend.' And the one ab- 
solute existence which is strictly necessary is ' a supreme 
and infinite and everlasting Mind in synthesis with all 
things '. 2 The whole volume, with its elaborate series of 
propositions and demonstrations, is too patently only a 
statement and re-statement of the ego-centric predicament. 
Moreover, the result of this line of argument, even if we were 
to take it as legitimately reached, seems more valuable than 
it is; for the Ego gained, whether human or divine, is no 
more than the bare form of consciousness. In our analysis 
we have allowed ourselves to become the victims of the eye- 
metaphor, the spectator-theory of consciousness. Instead 
of treating the subject as the organic unity of the psychical 
content, this theory lifts it out of the living process alto- 
gether, and sets it like a static eye in position over against 
its states or ideas, to which it is related, accordingly, as 
a kind of abstract and unchanging unit or point of reference. 
The Ego, we are told, is not the ideas and states, it has them. 
But an Ego or subject thus conceived stands in a merely 

1 Institutes of Metaphysics, p. 137 (section i, proposition 4, observa- 
tion 13). 

2 Ibid., pp. 511, 522 (section 3, propositions 10 and n). 



x FERRIER AND GREEN 195 

external relation to its content; it is the abstraction of a 
formal unity or, to vary the metaphor, it is like an empty 
vessel into which the content is packed. If the proof of an 
everlasting mind in synthesis with all things means no more 
than the necessity of such an abstract point of reference, its 
existence seems hardly worth contending for. And yet I do 
not think that this kind of epistemological demonstration 
can yield us more. 

We reach, I am afraid, a very similar result in Green. 
Green's theory moves in a Kantian atmosphere. His 
Spiritual Principle is directly derived from Kant's doctrine 
of the synthetic unity of apperception present in every act 
of knowing. Green, perhaps with Ferrier in his mind, 
acknowledges that it is unwarrantable * to assume, because 
all reality requires thought to conceive it, that therefore 
thought is the condition of its existence '. But although we 
cannot take up this general position, we may, he thinks, 
arrive at the same result by observing that what we call the 
real world consists of things in relation to one another, or, 
as Green tends on the whole to say, consists of relations. 1 
Knowledge of relation implies ' a combining agency ' or 
' unifying principle ' which, while maintaining the distinction 
of the terms, produces ' a real unity of the manifold ' by 
setting them in relation to one another, viewing them, for 
example, as successive or co-existent, as similar, or as related 
in the way of cause and effect — related, in short, in some 
one of the many ways which constitute facts members of 
a common world. And as we are obliged to believe that 
relations are somehow real apart from our individual knowl- 
edge of them, ' we must recognize as the condition of this 
reality the action of some unifying principle analogous to 
that of our understanding ' ; for ' relations can only exist for 

1 He identifies ' the conception of nature ' with that ' of a single all- 
inclusive system of relations ', and formulates his inquiry, ' What is im- 
plied in there being such a single all-inclusive system of relations?' 
(Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 30). 



196 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM lect. 

a thinking consciousness V The synthetic unity is thus 
taken to be ' the basis not merely of our knowledge of uni- 
form relations between phenomena but of there being those 
uniform relations. The source of the relations and the 
source of our knowledge of them is one and the same,' ' the 
consciousness [namely] which constitutes reality and makes 
the world one/ ' the all-uniting consciousness '. Relations 
* only exist for or through the action of [this] unifying and 
self-distinguishing spiritual subject \ Consciousness, he says 
again, is ' the medium and' sustainer ' of relations. The 
eternal consciousness is * the spirit for which the relations 
of the universe exist \ 2 

Now, as William James in his character of * radical 
empiricist ', so often pointed out, this argument really 
starts from the assumption of atomistic and unrelated 
sensations, such as we find it, for example, in Locke and 
Hume. According to this defunct psychology (which was, it 
must be remembered, the presupposition and the raison d'etre 
of the Kantian scheme), what is given to us in sensation is 
mere multiplicity or disjunction. All unity and relatedness 
thus comes to be explained, by Hume, as a fiction of the 
imagination, and, by Kant, as superinduced upon the mat- 
ter of sense by the synthetic activity of thought. Thought, 
in Green's phrase, is ' the combining agency ' which, acting 
as it were ab extra on the sensational flux, transforms it 
into a world of permanently related objects. But, as James 
quite unanswerably urges, if relations between objects are 
in any way real, they must be represented in feeling just 
as much as the objects which are said to be related. ' We 
ought to say a feeling of " and ", a feeling of " if ", a 
feeling of " but ", and a feeling of " by ", quite as readily 
as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold/ And it 

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 32, 53. 

2 These quotations are all from the first and second chapters of the 
Prolegomena to Ethics. See in particular pp. 35, 43, 52-3, 68, 78. 



x GREEN'S SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLE 197 

may be taken as admitted in recent discussion that thought, 
in operating upon sense and transforming it, as it undoubt- 
edly does, does not infuse into sense anything which was 
not already there in sensuous form. 1 The unity of experi- 
ence, so far as it is unified and connected, is just as real 
and primitive a fact as its variety, and we do not require 
the apparatus of a special principle to constitute and sus- 
tain relations any more than to sustain existence in general. 
Green's argument, therefore, reduces itself to that of Fer- 
rier for ' an everlasting mind in synthesis with all things \ 

Green's • eternal consciousness, moreover, is described 
exactly as if it were an enlarged human mind, built upon 
the same pattern of relational thought, but having spread 
out before it a complete intellectual scheme of the cosmic 
relations, which is partially and intermittently present 
to finite minds — ' communicated ' to them, as he frequently 
says, by this eternal spiritual principle. But we want more 
than a conceptual scheme of this sort to give us the kind 
of reality and independence which all theories are forced 
to attribute to the world of sense-perception. To think of 
the world as a permanent presentation, self-presented to 
an eternal percipient, does not meet the case, unless we 
confer upon the presentation just that degree of distinct 
and independent being which makes it a real object con- 
templated by the eternal percipient, and therefore capable 
of being similarly contemplated by other minds. Green's 
own account is extremely vague as to the sense in which 
he understands the spiritual principle to ' sustain ' and 
' constitute ' nature. He talks of it most frequently as 
' present to ' the facts, and by its presence relating them 
to one another. He talks at other times — pretty frequently 
— of the ' action ' or the ' activity ' of the principle in 
* constituting ' or ' making ' nature ; but the agency appears 
on examination to be simply the combining and relating 

1 Psychology, vol. i, p. 245. Cf. Essays in Radical Empiricism, pp. 42-4. 



198 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM lect. 

activity in knowledge — ' the unifying action of spirit ' — 
from which he started. 1 

In fact, the more closely we examine Green's statements, 
the more unsatisfactory appears the result reached by his 
argument. He talks of it habitually as a spiritual prin- 
ciple, and describes it more fully as ' a single active self-con- 
scious principle ', 2 or, as he puts it in the closing sentence 
of his long Introduction to Hume : ' The recognition of a 
system of nature logically carries with it that of a self- 
conscious subject — the designation of which as " mind ", as 
" human ", as " personal ", is of secondary importance, but 
which is eternal, self-determined, and thinks.' But the 
nature of the transcendental argument is enough to remind 
us that, as it is with reference to the system of nature that 
the principle has been deduced, it is nothing out of that 
reference, and it is what in that reference it does. Now 
what it does in relation to the manifold world is simply to 
unify it. Hence the designation of the principle almost 
ad nauseam in English Hegelian writers as ' a principle of 
unity \ The unity of apperception, Kant teaches in his 
Deduction, is precisely equivalent to the idea of nature as a 
unity, or at least the one idea is the obverse of the other. 
So Green tells us : ' That the unifying principle should dis- 
tinguish itself from the manifold which it unifies is, indeed, 
the condition of the unification; but it must not be sup- 
posed that the manifold has a nature of its own apart from 
the unifying principle, or this principle another nature of 

1 p. 43. On p. 34 it is described as ' an agent which distinguishes itself 
from the feelings, uniting them in their severalty, making them equally 
present in their succession '. Cf . p. 53 : ' the consciousness which con- 
stitutes reality and makes the world one '. In a different context (p. 78) 
he speaks of our partial knowledge of the universe as rendered possible 
through 'the continued action of the eternal consciousness in and upon 
the sentient life '. But the reference here is to the ideal of completed 
knowledge as operative in a growing experience; and the expression, 
therefore, does not bear on the question we are specially considering. 

2 p. 40. 



x THE EMPTY FORM OF THE EGO 199 

its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold 
world. . . . There is no separate particularity, in the agent, 
on the one side, and the determined world as a whole, on the 
other. . . . The world has no character but that given it by 
this action, the agent no character but that which it gives 
itself in this action.' * Consequently, as he says in another 
place, ' the concrete whole may be described indifferently as 
an eternal intelligence realised in the related facts of the 
world or as a system of related facts rendered possible by 
such an intelligence '. 2 'All things in the world are deter- 
mined by it, in the sense that they are determined by each 
other in a manner that would be impossible but for its equal 
self-distinguishing presence to them all! 3 As such an 
impartial presence, the eternal consciousness becomes, in a 
phrase of Mr. Balfour's, just ' the bare geometrical point 
through which must pass all the threads which make up the 
web of nature ' ; 4 or, as we may say, it is the ideal focus 
into which the system of relations is reflected, the empty 
form of the Ego or consciousness in general, the dot upon 
the i, which the theory of knowledge exacts. 5 

This is the same result as we reached before in Ferrier's 
case, and it seems to confirm our view of the fallacious 
character of any direct argument from the conditions of 
knowledge to the theorem of an All-Thinker and of the 
universe as the system of his thought. It confirms also the 
nugatory nature of any conclusion that could possibly be 
reached by such a method, even if valid. The formal Ego, 
which is all that the mentalistic argument yields, is of no 
real account. What difference does it make whether we 



1 pp. 80-1. 2 p. 38. 3 p. 82 (italics mine). 

4 In an article on ' Green's Metaphysics of Knowledge ', Mind, vol. ix, 
p. 89 (1884). 

5 So Caird speaks of the consciousness of God (which, he is insisting, 
is involved in the consciousness of self) as ' the consciousness of the 
universal unity or centre which all knowledge implies' {Critical Philos- 
ophy of Kant, vol. i, p. 215). 



200 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM lect. 

regard nature as existing per se, or insist that all her proc- 
esses are registered in a mind, if that mind is nothing but 
such a register or impartial reflection of the facts? I do 
not think, therefore, that any such short cut to the desired 
goal is likely to take us there. Ultimately, I believe it is 
true, as I have argued all along, that we cannot take nature 
as existing per se ; it has to be taken as an element in a whole 
which cannot be expressed except in terms of conscious 
values. All values depend on feeling, on some form of 
consciousness or living experience. Familiar with values in 
our own experience, we feel it impossible to conceive any- 
thing devoid of value (such as an unconscious material 
system would be) as ultimately real or self-subsistent, in 
other words, as a whole, a res completa. It is this moral im- 
possibility, I think, as much as the speculative contradiction 
of a world existing absolutely unknown, that is the driving- 
power of the idealistic argument. In both its aspects the 
argument may be impeached as circular in its proof. It is not 
so much an argument perhaps as an absolute conviction, but 
it is, I think, a conviction whose reasonableness is sustained 
by the unreasonableness of the opposite hypothesis. 

Spirit, we believe, therefore, is the terminus ad quern of 
nature. As it has been finely expressed by an Eastern 
thinker, ' all external things were formed that the soul 
might know itself and be free \ 1 Unconscious nature thus 
assumes the character of a means or intermediary towards 
an end, in so far as conscious centres of existence alone 
possess that degree of separateness and independence which 
would justify the term creation in their regard. Such 
terms as creation, means and end demand, as we shall find, 
a rigid scrutiny, which may leave little of their ordinary 
meaning attaching to them when they are used to describe 
the ultimate conditions of the universe. But with that 
reserve they still remain useful and intelligible modes of 

1 Kapila (quoted in Professor A. G. Hogg's Karma and Redemption). 



x THE LARGER IDEALISTIC TRUTH 201 

indicating a real distinction within the world of facts as 
known. The instrumental or mediating function of the 
material world was the larger idealistic truth which underlay 
the mentalistic form of Berkeley's argument. And that 
may, I think, be held along with a frankly realistic attitude 
towards external nature. 

Hume epigrammatically described Berkeley's arguments 
as admitting of no answer but producing no conviction. The 
apparent unanswerability was due, however, to the pre- 
suppositions common to both thinkers ; and modern analysis 
successfully exposes the failure to distinguish in the am- 
biguous word ' idea ' between the act of knowing and the 
object known, on which ambiguity Berkeley's identification 
of the object and the sensation really rests. 1 In all knowl- 
edge there is the reference to an object beyond the process 
itself; and this realistic implication is so imbedded in lan- 
guage that subjective idealism achieves its apparent success 
only by tacitly presupposing the real object which it attempts 
to deny. The distinction between the act or the subjective 
process and the object applies as much to the knowledge 
of our own states, when these are introspectively observed, 
as to the knowledge of anything else; and there is no 
justification, therefore, for the traditional theory, on which 
Mentalism bases, that we know only our own states directly 
and all other things representatively through them. Knowl- 
edge, as the modern realists sometimes say, is ' a unique 
relation ', which cannot be explained by analysing it into 
anything simpler, or by the use of physical and quasi-physical 
metaphors. The knower is everywhere in direct relation 
with his object, and we know all kinds of objects on 
the same terms. There is no more difficulty in knowing 



1 ' In truth the object and the sensation are the same thing, and cannot 
therefore be abstracted from each other ' (Principles of Human Knowl- 
edge, section 5). This noteworthy but too dangerous phraseology was 
withdrawn in the second edition. 



202 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM lect. 

a material thing than there is in knowing the memory- 
image of it or any other purely subjective phenomenon. 
The unconvincingness of the mentalistic argument is due, 
therefore, to its real unsoundness — a very simple and 
sufficient explanation, which naturally did not occur to 
Hume. 

And when we are forced to -abandon the attempt to 
identify perceived objects with the transient experiences of 
finite minds — as Berkeley of course is almost at once com- 
pelled to do — it is no legitimate way out of the difficulty 
to fly off, as he does, to an ultimate generality, and refer 
them simpliciter to the will of an Infinite Spirit, or to treat 
them, with Green, as thought-relations permanently present 
to such a cosmic Mind. That is to reverse the true order of 
going, and is really an attempt to evade the full consequences 
of our failure. For an acknowledgement of the impossi- 
bility of identifying the object with our own state should 
have as its result just the recognition of the independent 
reality of the object as we know it. Ultimately, no doubt, 
as I have said, if the larger idealism is to be maintained, the 
independence attributed to the material world cannot be 
taken as the assertion of its existence as a brute fact per se. 
It must be seen as an element in a whole, with a specific 
function within that whole. But how this real system of 
externality, on which as finite spirits we depend, is related 
to or included in an absolute experience, is necessarily dark 
to us; for to answer such a question would mean to tran- 
scend the very conditions of our separate individuality. We 
can but dimly apprehend that, to such an experience, nature 
cannot be external in the way in which it necessarily is to the 
finite minds which it shapes and fills And just because 
the two experiences are not in this respect in pari materia, 
the mode in which nature is included in the Absolute cannot 
be expected to throw light on the question in debate between 
mentalist and realist. But, at any rate, to treat the system 



x NATURE AND THE ABSOLUTE 203 

of nature (as Berkeley does) as the effect in finite centres of 
an abstract Will, is to evade the real difficulty altogether ; * 
and to figure its ultimate reality (as Green seems constantly 
inclined to do) as that of a system of thought-relations is 
so astonishingly meagre and incredible an account of the 
mighty fact in question that it explains Mr. Bradley's 
famous protest against the dissolution of the world into 
' some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or un- 
earthly ballet of bloodless categories \ 2 

And if it is unnatural and completely unconvincing to 
treat nature as a set of ideas or intellectual processes in 
a world-mind, conceived after the pattern of our own, it 
seems to me no less unnatural, as I argued in the previous 
lecture, to coin nature into the small change of an infinite 
number of monads or little minds. Both theories are, in 
fact, prompted by the same difficulty; and the expedient 
adopted is, in principle, identical. The difficulty is to con- 
ceive the unconscious thing with no central unity of feeling, 
however vague, to give it individuality and existence for 
itself. And it seems an easy way out of the difficulty either 
to put a mind — a speck, as it were, of consciousness — 
behind each of the minutest atoms or ions into which 
physical science resolves the world, or to supply the cen- 
trality by treating the material system en bloc as the object 
of a cosmic mind. In both cases there is the attempt to 
escape from a difficulty by a general hypothesis which runs 
counter to the direct suggestion of the facts, and which 
necessarily, therefore, ' produces no conviction ' — has no 
vital meaning, that is to say, for our experience. What 
relevance has either theory to the lapping of the waves, the 
summer rain, or the wind among the trees, to Nature's 

1 As Berkeley himself at a later period came to realize. He touches — 
though very slightly — in Siris on the mode in which nature may be con- 
ceived as present to the divine consciousness. 

2 At the close of his Logic, in 1883. Such an abstract intellectualism, 
he says, ' strikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism '. 



204 IDEALISM AND MENTALISM x 

aspects of impersonal vastness, of resistless power, or en- 
during peace — 

The silence that is in the starry sky, 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills ? 

Both theories are intended, of course, as a demonstration 
of the idealist contention that the ultimate reality of the 
universe is spiritual. In both cases, however, the stress is 
laid on the bare form of consciousness. But the infinite 
multiplication of so-called conscious centres, which are ad- 
mittedly no more than the supposed inward aspect of purely 
mechanical reactions — the dynamics of a particle in psycho- 
logical terms — is no enrichment of the content of the uni- 
verse. And nothing is gained, as we have seen, by the 
formal abstraction of unity which figures in the mentalistic 
demonstrations. The content of the universe is alone 
worth contending for — the reality of infinite values open to 
appropriation and enjoyment by beings at a certain level 
of existence. 1 



1 See Supplementary Note C, p. 420. 



SECOND SERIES 

1912-13 



LECTURE XI 

THE ARGUMENT OF THE FIRST COURSE. 

THE LOWER PANTHEISM AND THE DOCTRINE 

OF ' DEGREES ' 

The survey taken and the results reached in last year's 
course were of a somewhat general nature. In the opening 
lecture we considered, as a kind of historical background 
and contrast, the remarkable discussion of theism by David 
Hume in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Based 
as it was exclusively on the evidence of design in external 
nature, the attenuated theism of Hume's conclusion 
afforded, in his own language, ' no inference that affects 
human life or can be the source of any action or forbear- 
ance,' and this seemed scarcely what the idea of God had 
meant in human experience. I then sought to show that the 
idea of intrinsic value or worth, which Kant found in his 
analysis of moral experience, had been of determining influ- 
ence upon the modern discussion of man's place in the 
scheme of things, thus shaping the view taken of the ultimate 
character of the universe. Kant's own presentation of the 
ideas of God and immortality as postulated by our ethical 
experience was defective, it was urged, owing to the exter- 
nalism of his treatment, arising from the individualistic 
and consequently deistic habit of thought which he shared 
with Hume and the eighteenth century generally. But 
the consciousness of value — the assertion of the objectivity 
of our fundamental estimates of value — remained central 
for Idealism in the long controversy with Naturalism 
which filled out the nineteenth century, and which still 
remains the specific form in which the philosophic problem 
presents itself to the modern mind. As Hoffding states it, 



208 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

it is the question of ' the relation between what seems 
to us men the highest value and existence as a whole '. 
The Kantian distinction between knowledge and belief, and 
the restriction of knowledge to the world of sense-percep- 
tion, as physical science conceives it, tended to suggest that 
the biological categories of life, the aesthetic perceptions 
of beauty and sublimity, and the implications of ethical 
experience were, after all, to be contrasted, as subjective 
interpretations and mere ideals or aspirations, with the 
assured objectivity of scientific knowledge and of the 
mechanical world-system which seemed to be its last word. 
Hence in many quarters the assertion of the principle of 
value took the form of a protest of the heart against the 
head, the feelings against the intellect; and in others, the 
demands of our ethical and aesthetic nature were opposed 
as a shadow-land of the poetic imagination to the harsh 
reality of a scientific materialism. But ideals must speedily 
wither if they are consciously realized to be but the cloud- 
land of fancy; to a true idealism they are an intense vision 
of the foundations on which the universe is built. And we" 
endanger the principle of value if we set one part of our 
nature against another in this way, and associate the prin- 
ciple with a campaign against ' intellectualism ' or, as some 
go the length of saying, against Reason. Any theory which 
leaves us with an irreconcilable dualism between supposed 
conclusions of the intellect and the ethico-religious inter- 
pretation of the world is essentially a surrender to scepticism, 
and therefore an impossible resting-place for the human' 
mind. Hence I urged that the vindication of human values 
could only become effective and convincing when accom- 
panied by the demonstration that the conclusions of 
Naturalism rest on a misinterpretation of the character of 
the scientific theories on which it founds — that Naturalism, 
in short, in spite of its claims to exclusive reality, is no 
more than the substantiation of an abstraction or of a 



xi THE HIGHER NATURALISM 209 

fragment that can exist only as an element in a larger 
whole. The principle of value, in other words, should be 
the informing principle of a coherent theory of reality 
instead of being put forward as a conviction which has, 
as it were, an independent root in a separate part of our 
nature, and which, instead of issuing from reason, is repre- 
sented almost as a protest against reason. 

The argument of the lectures which followed was in the 
main directed to establish this position. I showed in the 
fourth lecture how the development of biology as an in- 
dependent science had demonstrated the insufficiency of 
purely mechanical conceptions to describe even the most 
elementary facts of life. In passing from physical and 
chemical phenomena to the behaviour of living matter we 
find ourselves instinctively and of necessity driven to a new 
range of categories, if we are, I will not say to explain, 
but even accurately to describe, the characteristic features 
of the facts before us. Such an acknowledgement, I argued, 
does not mean an attempt to re-introduce miraculous inter- 
ferences, unbridgeable chasms and special creations. These 
are the apparatus of an arbitrary and external Super- 
naturalism, against which the protest of Naturalism was 
entirely justified. Science and philosophy alike support 
the demand for order and continuity. But nature, I said, 
is not the less nature, because it exhibits a scale of quali- 
tative differences; the principle of continuity is misinter- 
preted, if it is supposed to imply a reduction of all the 
facts of experience to the dead level of a single type. It 
is important, I suggested, to distinguish between the lower 
and the higher Naturalism. The lower Naturalism is that 
which seeks to merge man in the infra-human nature from 
which he draws his origin — which consistently identifies 
the cause of any fact with its temporal antecedents, and 
ultimately equates the outcome of a process with its starting- 
point. A higher Naturalism will not hesitate to recognize 



210 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

the emergence of real differences where it sees them, with- 
out feeling that it is thereby establishing an absolute chasm 
between one stage of nature's processes and another. What 
we have to deal with is the continuous manifestation of a 
single Power, whose full nature cannot be identified with 
the initial stage of the evolutionary process, but can only 
be learned from the course of the process as a whole, and 
most fully from its final stages. Although the appearance 
of life is a peculiarly impressive instance of a synthesis 
which refuses to be analysed into the merely physical and 
chemical facts which were its apparent antecedents, it is by 
no means the only one. Scientific thinkers, fighting against 
the theological doctrine of special creation, have pointed to 
the phenomenon of crystallization as similarly inexplicable 
by the unguided forces of gravity and cohesion. And within 
the realm of life there is the passage from the vegetable to 
the animal, and in the realm of consciousness the passage 
from instinct and association to the conceptual reason. In 
all these cases, questions of historical origin or of transi- 
tional forms are philosophically irrelevant. The philosophi- 
cal point is that in each case we do pass to a new plane or 
level of existence, qualitatively different from the preceding, 
and opening up, through that difference, a new range of 
possibilities to the beings which it includes. 

It is between the human intelligence and its antecedent 
conditions, between nature and man, that the idea of a 
chasm or absolute break is most deeply rooted, both in 
philosophy and in ordinary thought. But it was the central 
contention of the later lectures of the course that man 
must be taken as organic to nature. If we consistently 
apply in this case the twin principles of continuity and 
immanence, I said, and steadily refuse to characterize the 
nature of the world till we have all the facts before us, some 
of the most persistent difficulties of modern thought will 
be found to disappear. The nature of the Power at work 



xi MAN ORGANIC TO NATURE 211 

in any process is only revealed, as has just been said, in 
the process as a whole, and the world is not complete 
without man and his knowledge. The idea of nature as 
a completed system and of man as a spectator ab extra 
is essentially false. The intelligent being is rather to be 
regarded as the organ through which the universe beholds 
and enjoys itself. From the side of the higher Naturalism, 
I sought to emphasize man's rootedness in nature, so that 
the rational intelligence which characterizes him appears as 
the culmination of a continuous process of immanent devel- 
opment. This organic point of view delivers us, I contended, 
from the difficulties which so sorely afflict modern philos- 
ophy as to the relativity, or subjectivity, or phenomenality, 
of knowledge, and the impossibility of knowing things as 
they really are. These difficulties depend on the conception 
of the world as a finished fact independently existing, and 
an equally independent knower with a peculiar apparatus of 
faculties which inevitably colour and subjectify any fact 
on which they are brought to bear. Such a conception errs 
also, I insisted, by treating the function of intelligence as 
purely cognitive, in the sense of simply mirroring or dupli- 
cating external facts, whereas all knowledge is an experi- 
ence, of the soul, which, as such, has necessarily its feeling- 
value; and the existence of such living centres capable 
of feeling the grandeur and beauty of the universe and 
tasting its manifold qualities is what is alone really signifi- 
cant in the universe. All values are in this sense conscious 
values; and so it is that the sentient and, still more, the 
rational being appears as the goal towards which Nature 
is working, namely, the development of an organ by which 
she may become conscious of herself and enter into the joy 
of her own being. 

While rejecting, therefore, the relativity of knowledge in 
the usual sense of that doctrine, I emphasized the essen- 
tial relatedness of nature and mind as the guarantee of the 



212 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

naturalness of the knowledge-process and the truthfulness 
of the result. I applied this specially to the case of the 
secondary qualities which are usually regarded as the 
stronghold of the relativistic theory. Popular science and 
popular philosophy take the physical scheme of moving 
particles or ethereal vibrations as the reality of nature 
as an objective system, all the rest being merely subjective 
appearance to finite subjects. But the objectivity of the 
secondary qualities as predicates of reality is affirmed 
both by common sense and by a ripe philosophy. The 
physiological process through which knowledge is attained 
does not invalidate the result. There is no explana- 
tion possible of the evolution of the sense-organs unless 
we assume the reality of the new features of the world 
to which their evolution introduces us. The organism is 
developed and its powers perfected as an instrument of 
Nature's purpose of self -revelation. And what is here 
claimed for the secondary qualities holds good also of the 
aspects of beauty and sublimity which we recognize in 
nature and those finer insights which we owe to the poet 
and the artist. These things ought not to be regarded as 
arbitrary fancies, subjective glosses upon nature's text — on 
the contrary, they give us a deeper truth than ordinary 
vision, just as the more developed eye or ear carries us 
farther into nature's beauties and refinements than the less 
perfect organs of a lower species. 

I applied the same idea of organic relatedness to the 
consideration of the ethical and social qualities which we 
recognize as constituting our humanity. For if the stigma 
of subjectivity can be attached with any semblance of 
justice to our knowledge, it will seem to apply with still 
greater force to the world of values in which our inmost 
and most personal nature finds expression. And, as a 
matter of fact, it is between man's nature as an ethical 
being and the apparently non-moral nature of the world 



xi THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY 213 

from which he springs, that the breach of continuity — not 
to say the apparent opposition — has been most keenly felt. 
I drew attention, in this connexion, to the sharp expres- 
sion of this dualism between man and nature in the Re- 
ligion of Humanity, one of the most characteristic prod- 
ucts of the nineteenth century, in its combination of a 
lofty ethical and religious idealism with an ultimate meta- 
physical agnosticism. Comte was right, I urged, in the 
stress he laid on the distinctively human qualities as alone 
fitted to call forth the emotions of love and worship — as 
alone, therefore, in a true sense, divine. His error lay in 
supposing that a purely subjective synthesis, as he called 
it, is possible — in other words, that it is possible to isolate 
humanity from the universe as a whole, and to treat it 
as a self-contained organism, evolving all its properties 
and engineering all its advances in its own strength and 
out of its own particularity. The specifically human experi- 
ences cannot be taken as an excrescence on the universe, 
or as a self-contained and underived world by themselves 
with no root in the nature of things. Man is, after all, 
the child of nature, and it is on the basis of natural 
impulses, and in commerce with the system of external 
things, that his ethical being is built up. Hence the char- 
acteristics of the ethical life must be taken as contributing 
to determine the nature of the system in which we live. 
According to the principle of value and the distinction 
between lower and higher ranges of experience, they should, 
indeed, carry us nearer to a true definition of the ultimate 
Life of which we are partakers than categories which suf- 
fice to describe, at most, the environmental conditions of 
human existence. 

The further analysis which I undertook of the Agnosti- 
cism which forms one strand in the Comtian theory, and 
which meets us in so many shapes in modern thought, con- 
sisted of little more ( as, to mv mind, it can consist of little 



2i 4 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

more) than an exposure of the fundamental absurdity of 
the demand to know a substance otherwise than through 
its qualities, a cause otherwise than through its effects, 
reality otherwise than through its appearance or mani- 
festation. The phenomenon is the noumenon so far as 
it has manifested itself. ' The power manifested to us 
through all existence,' an ' Infinite and Eternal Energy 
manifested alike within us and without us ', to which * we 
must ascribe not only the manifestations themselves but 
the law of their order ' (those are Spencer's own words) 
can hardly be fitly designated by that barren abstraction, 
the Unknowable. The designation is due, in part at least, 
to a failure on Spencer's part, as on Sir William Hamilton's 
before him, to distinguish between the inaccessible, that 
which is, by its very nature, cut of! from knowledge, 
and that which is unfathomable or inexhaustible by any 
finite mind; and it was doubtless the positive elements, 
acknowledged or unacknowledged, in his conception which 
invested the Unknowable in Spencer's eyes with a genuine 
religious halo, and made it appear to him the suitable 
residuary legatee of the religious sentiments of mankind. 
But, while he rightly condemned the attempt of the Posi- 
tivists to isolate Humanity and treat it as a kind of finite 
God — while he rightly contends that the veneration and 
gratitude which Comte claims for Humanity are due in 
the last resort, if due at all, to * that ultimate Cause, 
that great stream of Creative Power ' as he calls it in the 
same context, ' from which Humanity individually and as 
a whole, in common with all other things, has proceeded ' — 
he strangely fails to see that it is only so far as the char- 
acter of that Power is taken to be revealed in the highest 
human qualities that it can call forth either veneration or 
gratitude. And so the worship of the Unknowable and the 
worship of Humanity, each untenable in itself, are found to 
owe their vitality (as we might have expected) to the partial 



xi APPEARANCE AND REALITY 215 

and complementary truths which they respectively enshrine, 
and which are only kept apart by a distorted conception of 
the relation of reality to its appearances. 

The main purpose of last year's argument might be 
fairly described as an attempt to establish a true meta- 
physic of that relation. Agnosticism of the ordinary type 
depends on the sheer separation of what is given together 
and cannot be conceived apart. But the Absolute, if we 
are to use the modern term,, is not unknown. According 
to a fine phrase of Professor Laurie's which I quoted, ' its 
predicates are the worlds ' ; we read its nature in the sys- 
tem of its appearances. God as immanent — the divine as 
revealed in the structure and system of finite experience — 
this may be said to have been the text of last year's 
discourse and the outcome of my argument. And in the 
philosophical interpretation of phenomena everything de- 
pends, I argued, on keeping the whole range of experience 
in view. Naturalism and kindred theories result, as we 
saw, from prematurely closing the record, instead of follow- 
ing out the evolutionary scheme to its obvious culmination 
in mind — mind that knows and appreciates, and thus 
rounds and completes what were otherwise a broken 
arch. There is no system, no whole of being, no real fact 
at all, till the external gathers itself up, as it were, into 
internality, and existence sums itself in the conscious 
soul. 

The view thus indicated commits us, it was urged in 
the two concluding lectures, 1 neither to a monadistic con- 
struction of the universe nor to any form of subjective 
idealism or mentalism. But it enshrines the conviction 
which Mr. Bradley expressed, in replying to certain of his 
critics, that ' that which is highest to us is also in and to 
the universe most real, and there can be no question of its 

1 These are to be considered as, in some respects, an appendix to the 
general argument contained in the first eight lectures. 



216 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

reality being somehow upset'. 1 Some such view of the 
systematic character of reality is taught in every constructive 
philosophy; and, short of such a conviction, we cannot be 
said, I think, to have either a philosophy or a religion in 
the ordinary sense. 

' God as immanent,' it has just been said, might be de- 
scribed as the text of our last year's discourse. In the 
more abstract language of recent philosophical discussion, 
our conclusion might also be expressed as ' the reality of 
appearances '. Mr. Bradley, in the title of his great book, 
and in his wholesale condemnation of the successive phases 
of our experience as ' mere appearances ', or as ' illusory ', 
'self-contradictory' and 'unreal', has laid himself open 
to the charge of reviving in a subtler form the old agnostic 
contrast between reality and its appearances. But such 
is not, as I understand him, Mr. Bradley's real intention 
or his deepest thought. He reminds us, at all events, 
emphatically that ' appearances exist, and whatever exists 
must belong to reality ' ; consequently whatever conclu- 
sion we may ultimately reach as to the nature of reality, 
we may at least ' be certain that it cannot be less than 
appearances '. 2 The universe, in short, or its informing 
principle, is ' good for ' as much as our experience actually 
shows it to contain. So expressed, this may appear a trivial 
result, and, as we shall immediately see, it leaves many 
questions still unanswered. But when we consider the 
almost incorrigible tendency of human thought to interpret 
the relation of appearance and reality as one of opposition 
or negation, it is very far from being as unimportant as it 
looks. In its original and legitimate sense, the antithesis 
in question is perfectly intelligible, and is constantly veri- 
fied in everyday practice. It means the contrast between 
the first view of a thing or situation — the first imperfect 
and probably more or less erroneous impression — and the 
1 Appearance and Reality (second edition), p. 560. 2 Ibid., p. 132. 



xi A DISTINCTION WITHIN EXPERIENCE 217 

corrected view that is the result of further examination. 
The contrast is, in short, between the thing as it first 
appears, and the thing as it eventually appears in the light 
of a fuller experience. But a misguided philosophy trans- 
fers this practical distinction between false and true within 
experience to the relation between our experience as a 
whole and a reality, which it is usually, and rightly, sup- 
posed to reveal, but which is now set over against all its 
appearances as something inaccessible and unknowable. 
For the progressive criticism of imperfect conceptions 
inherent in the advance of knowledge, and systematically 
carried out in philosophical reflection, there is substituted, 
more or less explicitly, a condemnation of knowledge as 
such, because to be known is to appear to the knower. 
Hence the importance of the contention that in the appear- 
ances we already grasp the nature of reality and that we 
can attain to it in no other way. 

This was, perhaps, the main thought in Lord Haldane's 
First Series of Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews, as indi- 
cated in their title, ' The Pathway to Reality '. That 
pathway does not lie through and behind phenomena to 
some inscrutable Beyond. ' It may be ', he says at the 
outset of his quest, ' that it is just in the world that is here 
and now, when fully comprehended and thought out, that 
we shall find God, and in finding God shall find the Reality 
of that world in Him.' And repeatedly he uses, to enforce 
his meaning, the emphatic and, at first blush, almost para- 
doxical phrase, ' the world as it seems \ ' If the stand- 
point of these lectures be a true one,' he says towards the 
close of his first volume, 1 ' we are free to believe in the 
world as it seems, and not driven to sacrifice any aspect of 
it. If the supposed facts of observation which we indicate 
by our names — life and development — are, what all plain 
people assume them to be, real facts, why should we strain 
1 The Pathway to Reality, p. 254. 



218 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

every faculty to explain human beings away into automata, 
or quiver with excitement when some one writes that he 
has found that protoplasm may apparently be reduced to 
a condition of chemical inertness. ... If a thousand such 
results were really established, we should yet be as far as 
ever from exhibiting life as a mechanical arrangement of 
molecules.' ' We ought ', he says again, ' to be prepared to 
believe in the different aspects of the world as it seems — 
life, for example, as much as mechanism, morality as much 
as life, religion as much as morality — for these belong to 
different aspects of the world as it seems, aspects which 
emerge at different standpoints, and are the results of 
different purposes and different categories in the organiza- 
tion of knowledge. And if Philosophy gives us back what 
Science threatened to take away, and restores to plain 
people their faith in the reality of each of these phases of 
the world as it seems, then Philosophy will have gone a 
long way to justify its existence.' x Hegel's metaphysic 
of essence and appearance has always seemed to me, in 
its massive realism, one of the fundamental insights of the 
philosophy from which Lord Haldane draws. Hegel is 
the last man to bid us rest content with first views of 
things; rather, philosophy is to him, in its essence, the 
systematic criticism of knowledge. But, in his view, the 
process of experience is, from the beginning, the growing 
knowledge of a self-manifesting reality. And the most 
important consequence of thus emphasizing the > essential 
truthfulness of the process of self-communication is just 
that it forbids any arbitrary limitation of truth to particu- 
lar phases or departments of experience — forbids us, for 
example, to treat the practical world of sense-perception 
as literally and finally real, and the expressions of the 
religious consciousness as the illusory product of selfish 
hopes and fears. Our experience is nowhere infected by 
1 The Pathway to Reality, p. 119. 



xi THE LOWER PANTHEISM 219 

radical falsehood. Criticism of detail and reflective inter- 
pretation of the whole are necessary in all departments; 
but in their main affirmations the ethical, the aesthetic and 
the religious consciousness have at least the same prima 
facie claim upon our belief as any other side of our experi- 
ence. And that general claim once admitted, it may well 
be that, on a critical review of experience as a whole, 
these phases of it may prove to be of more decisive im- 
portance than any others for our final conception of the 
world. 

For it is clear, as I have emphasized from the first, that 
in the philosophical interpretation of phenomena everything 
depends on the idea of system and the scale of values which 
is associated with it. If every phenomenon is, so to say, 
as good as another, there can be no talk of a principle 
of the whole and no sense in seeking to determine its 
nature. If every event, every feature of the world, in its 
isolation as a particular fact just as it occurs, is referred 
directly to the operation of the supreme principle, that 
principle becomes simply the pell-mell of empirical occur- 
rence over again. The doctrine of immanence becomes on 
these terms a perfectly empty affirmation; for the operative 
principle supposed to be revealed is simply the character- 
less unity of ' Being ', in which the sum-total of phenomena 
is indiscriminately housed. The unity reached is the unity 
of a mere collection, and everything remains just as it was 
before. Such a pantheism is indistinguishable from the 
barest Naturalism. ' All in All,' said Fichte in another 
reference, ' and for that very reason nothing at all.' This 
lower pantheism, as it may be called, is common in the 
popular cults of the East, where the immanental unity of 
the divine is little more than the idea of a teeming nature, 
and passes easily into a gross polytheism, whose deities rep- 
resent and consecrate every natural force and tendency. 
In pantheistic thought on a higher intellectual level, one 



220 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

often meets the same tendency to press the idea of the 
immanence of the divine in all phenomena equally, and 
thereby to use the Absolute as an instrument for the oblitera- 
tion of all distinctions of rank and value. Notable examples 
are to be found in the epigrammatic but shallow philosophy 
of Pope's Essay on Man : 

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul ; 
That changed thro' all, and yet in all the same, . . . 
Lives thro' all life, extends thro' all extent, 
Spreads undivided, operates unspent ; 
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, 
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart : 
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns, 
As the rapt Seraph that adores and burns : 
To Him no high, no low, no great, no small; 
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. 

(I. 267-80.) 

Sometimes (as to some extent in the lines quoted) this 
levelling down of finite distinctions appears as the counter- 
part of an insistence on the incomparable and unapproach- 
able greatness of the divine. The tendency of mystical 
thought to exalt the divine above all predicates, making 
it literally the unnameable, the ineffable, the unknowable, 
leads in a similar direction; for that which is characterless 
cannot be said to reveal itself more intimately in one aspect 
of experience than another; and so, as Bradley says, 
this empty transcendence and this shallow pantheism are 
seen to be opposite sides of the same mistake. 1 But the 
* principle of unity ' which philosophers seek is not the 
unity of a mere collection or of a bare abstraction. It 
is unity of system that is clearly intended; and the idea 
of a systematic whole essentially involves discrimination, 
perspective, something like a hierarchy of means and 
end. The true revelation of the divine must be sought, 
1 Cf. Appearance and Reality, p. 551. 



xi SPINOZA AND HIS CRITICS 221 

therefore, as I have contended, in the systematic structure 
of finite experience as a whole. 

Spinoza's system is, from one point of view, an example 
of the logic which, in its attempt to characterize the 
Absolute, abstracts from all finite determinations, and is 
left, accordingly, with the definition of God as mere Sub- 
stance or Being. Moreover, his insistence on the universal 
and thorough-going immanence of the divine causation 
exposed him to the accusation of abolishing the distinction 
between good and evil, and, indeed, of reducing all distinc- 
tions to one dead level of indifference. In the famous 
appendix to the First Book of the Ethics, he includes good 
and evil, right and wrong, praise and blame, as well as 
beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, among human 
' prejudices ', abstractions of the imagination, due to man's 
incorrigible habit of judging every fact according to its 
beneficial or harmful effects upon himself. ' The perfection 
of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature 
and capacity ' ; and so regarded everything in its own place 
as it exists is equally perfect and equally necessary, seeing 
that all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature. 
It was sentences such as these, in entire harmony as they 
seemed with the whole tenor of his system, which drew 
upon him from one of his correspondents the charge of 
' removing all the sanctions of virtue and reducing us to 
automata ', of degrading human beings to the level of the 
brutes or even of plants and stones. Spinoza's patient 
letters in reply are important because, whether they com- 
pletely turn the point of the criticism or not, they are clear 
proof that Spinoza did not intend his doctrine of God to 
override the specific differences between the parts of nature 
or what he would have called the ' essences ' or * natures ' 
of things. Although God is the immanent cause of all 
things — that is an ontological tie which it is impossible to 
sever — still the divine nature is not equally manifested in 



222 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES lect. 

everything: there are degrees of perfection or reality. As 
he quaintly puts it : ' A mouse no less than an angel is 
dependent on God, yet a mouse is not a kind of angel.' So 
again : * The wicked, it is true, do in their fashion the will 
of God, but they are not, on that account, in any way 
comparable to the good. The more perfection a thing has, 
the more does it participate in deity, and the more does it 
express God's perfection. Since, then, the good have incom- 
parably more perfection than the bad, their virtue cannot be 
likened to the virtue of the wicked, inasmuch as the wicked 
lack the love of God, which proceeds from the knowledge 
of God, and by reason of which alone we are, according to 
our human understanding, called the servants of God. The 
wicked, knowing not God, are but as instruments in the 
hands of a workman, serving unconsciously, and perishing 
in the using; the good, on the other hand, serve consciously, 
and in serving become more perfect ' (Ep. 32). Finally, he 
says, we can understand best the nature of God's relation to 
the universe ' by considering, not stocks and plants, but the 
most reasonable and perfect creatures ' (Ep. 34). 

Here, then, in Spinoza, where a priori we might perhaps 
have least expected it, we get the doctrine of ' degrees of 
truth or reality ', the emphatic assertion of which made 
Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality such an important 
contribution to contemporary thought. Spinoza's reply to 
his critics is, in effect, the acknowledgement of an objective 
scale of values, which reinstates the distinctions which he 
had apparently denied; and, inconsistent as it may seem 
with his thorough-going determinism, the concluding book 
of the Ethics sets before us the true or ideal life of man 
as a gospel of liberation. I have already referred to the 
negative argument with which this doctrine of Degrees is 
linked in Mr. Bradley's exposition, and we shall have 
occasion to return at a later stage to criticize certain of 
its implications. But however Mr. Bradley reconciles to 



xi AN OBJECTIVE SCALE OF VALUES 223 

himself apparently conflicting positions, it is sufficiently 
plain from his concluding paragraphs that, in his own view, 
the vital contention of his book is the positive doctrine 
that reality is revealed in the system of its appearances, 
and that the standards of better and higher which we apply 
are themselves based on the nature of reality and dictated 
by it. 1 With this conclusion we may intimate our agree- 
ment in advance, but the nature of our criterion of value 
and the justification of the objective character we attribute 
to it are points that still call for further discussion. This 
will form the subject of the next lecture. One thing, how- 
ever, is already plain from all that has gone before. The 
standard or principle of value must be found in the nature 
of the system as a whole. Judgements of value, in other 
words, are not to be taken, like the intuitions of an older 
philosophy, as so many detached and mutually independent 
pronouncements of one faculty or another upon particular 
features or aspects of the world. They represent rather 
so many parts of one fundamental judgement in which 
the nature of reality, as exhibited in the system, may be 
said to affirm itself. Every particular judgement depends 
for its ultimate sanction on the recognition of its object 
as a contributory element to this inclusive whole. 

If I might venture to illustrate my meaning by turning 
from nature to art, I would point to the outlook on the world 
which we get in the greatest poetry. Let us take the case 
of Shakespeare, for Shakespeare has been accused by a 
recent writer of being too like nature and giving us no world- 
view — no philosophy — of his own. Shakespeare, says this 
writer, ' is all the world over again. Here is human life no 
doubt, and a brilliant pageantry it is, but human life as 
varied and as problematic as it is in the living. There is 

1 'The positive relation of every appearance as an adjective to Reality, 
and the presence of Reality among its appearances in different degrees 
and with diverse values — this double truth we have found to be the 
centre of philosophy' (p. 551). 



224 THE DOCTRINE OF DEGREES xi 

no Shakespearian point of view. He possessed no unitary- 
conception of the meaning and larger relations of human 
life.' * That is true, so far as it emphasizes the richness and 
many-sidedness of Shakespeare's nature and the dramatic 
character of his genius, which enables him to realize and to 
express sympathetically very various attitudes towards life 
and the ultimate problems. It is true also if it means that 
Shakespeare had no cut-and-dry theory of the universe. He 
was no precise and self-satisfied expounder of the ways of 
God to man : the complexity and the mystery of existence 
are the themes of his deepest utterances. 

Men must endure 
Their going hence, e'en as their coming hither ; 
Ripeness is all. 

But on the fundamental verities his touch is sure. Shake- 
speare gives us the heart-shaking tragedies of Lear and 
Othello, full of baseness and wickedness and folly and the 
cruelty of things, but he gives us Cordelia and Desdemona 
as their centre. And, as in the old story of the three men 
who were cast into the fiery furnace, ' the fire had no power 
upon their bodies, and the smell of fire had not passed on 
them,' so in the case of Cordelia and Desdemona we feel — 
the poet makes us feel — that evil and death have no power 
over their radiant and triumphant goodness. The last word 
is with Truth and Love. That is Shakespeare's criticism of 
life. It is also a theory of things. And as in the world of 
Shakespeare's tragedies, so in the greater world, which they 
reflect as Shakespeare saw it, we have to take the fabric of 
the world as a whole, before we recognize the foundations on 
which it stands. 

1 R. B. Perry, Approach to Philosophy, pp. 32-4. 



LECTURE XII 

THE CRITERION OF VALUE : ITS NATURE AND 
JUSTIFICATION 

We accepted at the close of the last lecture the principle 
that the nature of reality can only mean the systematic struc- 
ture discernible in its appearances, and that{fhis niust furnish 
us with our ultimate criterion of value. We have accepted, 
therefore, in a sense in which it seemed to us intelligible 
and true, the criterion on which ' absolutist ' writers like 
Mr. Bradley and Professor Bosanquet lay so much stress. 
But much controversy has raged round the particular form 
in which they express the position. It is well known that the 
revolt against Mr. Bradley's Absolutism was one main cause 
of the Pragmatist movement which has since assumed such 
wide dimensions. The accusation originally brought against 
Mr. Bradley by the Personal Idealists, who were the fore- 
runners, and in some cases the pioneers, of Pragmatism, was 
based, in their own words, upon his ' way of criticizing 
human experience not from the standpoint of human experi- 
ence, but from the visionary and impracticable standpoint of 
an absolute experience V or, in Mr. Schiller's more drastic 
phraseology, ' his inhuman, incompetent and impracticable 
intellectualism \ 2 The reference is more particularly to the 
way in which Mr. Bradley, in Appearance and Reality, uses 
his criterion to ' condemn ', as he says, the world of appear- 
ances en bloc. This naturally provokes the question or 
retort — What knowledge have we of this Absolute, in whose 
name condemnation is so magisterially passed upon the 
world of our actual experience? And I think it must be 

1 Personal Idealism, Preface, p. viii. 2 Ibid., p. 127. 



226 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

admitted that Mr. Bradley's mode of procedure is unfor- 
tunate. He says repeatedly that a complete philosophy 
would be ' a systematic account of all the regions of appear- 
ance ', in which * the whole world of appearance would be 
set out as a progress, a development of principle though not 
in time, and every sphere of experience would be measured 
by the absolute standard and given a rank answering to its 
own relative merits and defects V His own doctrine of 
degrees of truth and reality is his positive contribution to 
such a philosophy, and it contains, I think, most of what is 
valuable and likely to be permanent in the volume. But 
the positive doctrine is almost swamped for the reader by 
the copious negative polemic in which Mr. Bradley labours 
to expose the self-contradictory nature of the phenomenal 
world from top to bottom. If we are to avoid misconcep- 
tion, therefore, it will be necessary to examine with some 
care the way in which the criterion is formulated by the two 
authors referred to. In that way we shall best define our 
own position. 

Mr. Bradley's statement of his criterion is familiar to us 
all. ' It is clear ', he says, ' that in rejecting the inconsistent 
as appearance, we are applying a positive knowledge of 
the ultimate nature of things. Ultimate reality is such that 
it does not contradict itself; here is an absolute criterion.' 
But to deny inconsistency is to assert consistency; and 
seeing that appearances, however contradictory they may 
be, still exist, and must therefore in some sense ' belong 
to reality ', ' we may make a further advance — we may say 
that everything which appears is somehow real in such a 
way as to be self-consistent. The character of the real is to 
possess everything phenomenal in a harmonious form.' And 
to achieve such an ' inclusive harmony ', ' the Reality must 
be a single whole ', ' beyond which there is nothing '. In 
other words, ' the Absolute is an individual and a system '. 2 

1 Appearance and Reality, p. 455. 2 Ibid., pp. 136-44- 



xii MR. BRADLEY'S FORMULA 227 

Returning to the subject in a later chapter, 1 he defines per- 
fection of truth and of reality as consisting in * positive 
self-subsisting individuality ', and recalls the two ways in 
which individuality appears. ' Truth must exhibit the mark 
of internal harmony or again the mark of expansion and 
all-inclusiveness. And these two characteristics are diverse 
aspects of a single principle.' Wherever we apply it, he 
says, ' the standard still is the same. And it is applied 
always under the double form of inclusiveness and harmony/ 
And again in the concluding pages of the volume we read, 
' our criterion is individuality or the idea of complete system.' 2 
Professor Bosanquet has emphasized his acceptance of the 
same formula by making it the title of his first course of 
Gifford Lectures : ' The Principle of Individuality and Value.' 
' I chose Individuality ', he says in his Preface, ' as the clue 
to my subject, because it seemed to be the principle which 
must ultimately determine the nature of the real and its con- 
stituents, of what is complete and self-contained, and of 
what approximates or belongs to such a reality.' ' The 
supreme principle of value and reality ' is ' wholeness, com- 
pleteness, individuality ', and ' the appeal to the whole is the 
same thing with the principle otherwise known as the prin- 
ciple of non-contradiction. . . . Every true proposition is 
so, in the last resort, because its contradictory is not conceiv- 
able in harmony with the whole of experience.' Again, ' It 
is all one whether we make non-contradiction, wholeness or 
individuality our criterion of the ultimately real.' ' The 
Individual is complete and coherent, and in the ultimate 
sense there can be only one Individual.' And once more, 
almost is"Mr. Bradley's words, * The standard [''the supreme 
standard of value '] is positive non-contradiction, developed 
through comprehensiveness and consistency.' 3 

1 Chap, xxiv, ' Degrees of Truth and Reality,' pp. 363, 371. 

2 P- 542. 

3 Cf. Individuality and Value, pp. vi, xxv, 44, 51, 68, 72, 299. 



228 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

' Our result so far is this,' says Mr. Bradley: ' The uni- 
verse is one in this sense that its differences co-exist har- 
moniously within one whole, beyond which there is nothing. 
Hence the Absolute is, so far, an individual and a system; 
but if we stop here [he admits] it remains but formal 
and abstract.' * ' Can we then ', he adds, ' say anything 
about the concrete nature of the system?' Mr. Bradley's 
answer is to identify existence with ' experience ', or, more 
definitely, ' sentient experience ', ' what is commonly called 
psychical eixstence \ This he does in language closely 
resembling Berkeley's. If, then, we read our former 
abstract definition in terms of this new position, ' our con- 
clusion, so far, will be this, that the Absolute is one system, 
and that its contents are nothing but sentient experience. 
It will, hence, be a single and all-inclusive experience, which 
embraces every partial diversity in concord.' Finally, Mr. 
Bradley proceeds to ask whether we really have a positive 
idea of an Absolute, thus defined as ' one comprehensive 
sentience ; ' and he answers that, while we cannot fully 
realize its existence, its main features are drawn from our 
own experience, and we have also a suggestion there of the 
unity of a whole embracing distinctions within itself. This 
we have in ' mere feeling or immediate presentation ', where 
we experience as an undifferentiated whole that which we 
afterwards proceed, in the exercise of relational thought, to 
analyse into the known world of self and not-self, with all its 
manifold objects and distinctions. Combining this primitive 
experience of felt unity with the later experience of known 
diversity, we can recognize the latter as a transitional stage, 
and thus reach the idea of a higher experience in which 
thought shall, as it were, return to the immediacy of feeling. 
' We can form the general idea of an absolute intuition in 
which phenomenal distinctions are merged ; a whole become 

''Appearance and Reality, p. 144 (the opening of the second chapter in 
Part II). 



xii THE ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE 229 

immediate at a higher stage without losing any richness.' 
' The relational form is a compromise on which thought 
stands, and which it develops. . . . [But] thought can form 
the idea of an apprehension, something like feeling in direct- 
ness, which contains all the character sought by its relational 
efforts ' ; ' a total experience where will and thought and 
feeling may all once more be one.' * 

We shall have to consider the conception of an absolute 
experience somewhat closely in the sequel. But what it is 
at present important to note is that Mr. Bradley repeatedly 
confesses, ' we have no direct knowledge of such an experi- 
ence ' ; ' the unity after all is unknown '. 2 And, as a natural 
consequence, we are equally ignorant of how ' the bewilder- 
ing mass of phenomenal diversity ' is harmonized, and its 
contradictions reconciled in the Absolute. But ' it must 
somehow be at unity and self-consistent '. 3 This confessed 
ignorance of the ' how ', combined with an inextinguishable 
faith as to the ' somehow ', has often been remarked upon, 
so constantly are the two repeated in Mr. Bradley's pages. 
1 We cannot understand how in the Absolute a rich harmony 
embraces every special discord, but on the other hand we 
may be sure that this result is reached.' ' We have no basis 
on which to doubt that all content comes together har- 
moniously in the Absolute. . . . All this detail is not made 
one in any way which we can verify. That it is all recon- 
ciled we know, but how, in particular, is hid from us.' 
■ Certainly, in the end, to know how the one and the many 
are united is beyond our power. But in the Absolute some- 
how, we are convinced, the problem is solved.' 4 In contrast 
with such passages, almost pathetic in their frequency, we 
have to set Mr. Bradley's emphatic, almost truculent, assur- 
ance that, ' with regard to the main character of the Abso- 

1 Ibid., pp. 160, 180, 181. 

2 Ibid., pp. 468, 473. It is ' not an experience but an abstract idea ' 
(p. 160). 

8 Ibid., p. 140. * Ibid., pp. 192, 239, 281. 



230 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

lute ', his ' conclusion is certain and that to doubt it logically 
is impossible \ 1 Or again, in a curious formula which he 
is fond of repeating : ' What may be, if it also must be, assur- 
edly is.' 2 In other words, reality must be a single and har- 
monious whole, but for aught we know it may be such a 
whole, therefore it is such a whole. Surely it is obvious that 
this strange attempt at demonstration does not carry us a step 
beyond the intellectual postulate of our initial ' must ' : 
' Reality must include and must harmonize every possible 
fragment of experience.' 3 And again it is clear that, unless 
we have at least some knowledge of the * how ', the knowl- 
edge claimed in these passages of the * is ' is not knowledge 
at all, in the ordinary sense, but a postulate or, if you like, a 
belief, an inextinguishable faith. 

And I would add that the criterion of inclusiveness and 
harmony, taken by itself, remains entirely formal and ab- 
stract, if not, indeed, tautologous. 4 It is only when applied 
to specific experience that the principle of non-contradiction 
or of internal coherence becomes more than an empty 
formula, and as soon as it is so applied it receives its char- 
acter from the concrete material in which it works itself out. 
The principle itself gives no guidance as to the mode in 
which the harmony is realized; and it leaves us conse- 
quently at the mercy of analogies which, it is more than 
probable, may be quite misleading. Hence it is an inversion 
of the true philosophic method to try to define the Absolute 
on the basis of the empty principle, and from that definition 
to reason down to the various phases of our actual experi- 
ence, and to ' condemn ' its most characteristic features, root 
and branch, as ' irrational appearance ' and ' illusion '. The 

1 p. 518. So again (p. 536), ' Up to this point our judgement is infal- 
lible, and its opposite is quite impossible/ 

2 P. 199. 8 P- 548. 

4 As I have suggested elsewhere, ' the mere consideration that the 
universe exists — that Being is — proves that it is in some sense a har- 
mony. All its aspects co-exist, and the business of the universe goes on ' 
(Man's Place in the Cosmos, 2nd ed., p. 127). 



xii FROM THE FINITE TO THE ABSOLUTE 231 

only possible result of such a procedure is exemplified in 
Mr. Bradley's actual conclusion, namely, that in the Abso- 
lute everything is somehow reconciled, but inasmuch as we 
know not how, none of the predicates drawn even from our 
highest experiences are applicable in this ultimate reference. 
' The Absolute ', he says, ' is not personal, nor is it moral, nor 
is it beautiful or true ' * — a cluster of negations which, 
though technically true, in the sense intended, are practically 
more false than would have been the corresponding affirma- 
tions. It was the strong impression which Mr. Bradley 
produced of following this barren method that provoked 
(and justified) the protest above referred to, against his 
* way of criticizing human experience from the visionary 
and impracticable standard of an absolute experience \ 

Professor Bosanquet, who, as we have seen, adopts the 
same criterion and formulates it in almost identical terms, 
appears to me to realize more clearly the dangers of such 
a procedure and, indeed, its inherent impossibility. His 
frequent phrase, ' the empty form of totality,' is itself sig- 
nificant in this connexion; and in general he follows, as if 
instinctively, the path from finite experience to the Absolute, 
tracing the organization of the real wholes in which, in the 
concrete material of life, the empty form realizes itself, and 
seeking, by critical use of the data thus obtained, to reach 
some positive determination of the nature of the ultimate 
Whole. It is surely by this experimental and tentative 
method alone that we are likely to reach results of any 
value. What can we extract from the principle of inclusive- 
ness and harmony apart from our experience of the concrete 
worlds of morality, of beauty, of love, or of the passion of 
the intellectual life? The specific modes in which the con- 
sciousness of value is realized must obviously in this sense 
be drawn from experience. They are directly apprehended ; 
we taste and see that they are good. And only through such 
1 Appearance and Reality, p. 537. 



22,2 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

experiences can we give any concrete content to the idea of 
a perfect or absolute Life. Accordingly it is upon such 
experiences, and within our actual experience as a whole, 
that the metaphysical criterion works, as Professor Bosan- 
quet has put it in an admirable passage : ' The fundamental 
nature of the inference to the Absolute ... is misappre- 
hended if we call upon it to put us in possession of an 
ultimate experience which is, ex hypothesi, incompatible 
with our limited being. What it will do for us is much more 
relevant to the transformation of our lives. It exhibits to 
us, in their relative stability and reciprocal suggestions of 
completeness, the provinces of experience which comprise the 
various values of life; it interprets the correlation of their 
worth with their reality, and of both with their satisfactori- 
ness to the soul. . . . What metaphysics may do, and in the 
hands of the masters always has done, is, starting from any 
datum, no matter what, to point out what sort of thing is in 
actual life the higher, the more stable, and what is the more 
defective and the more self-contradictory, and to indicate 
the general law or tendency by which the latter is absorbed 
in the former.' l We are limited, in fact, to the immanent 
criticism of more or less in our actual experience. The per- 
fect or absolute is something which we feel after, whose 
characters we divine in the light of the best we know, taking, 
as Professor Bosanquet says elsewhere, 2 ' the general direc- 
tion of our higher experiences as a clue to the direction in 
which perfection has to be sought '. That is to say, in sum, 
that we do not argue — and it would be a futile procedure 
if we did — from the bare idea of a systematic whole, but 
from the amount of system and the kind of system which we 
are able to point to as realized in experience. From that we 
argue to more of the same kind, or at least on the same gen- 
eral lines, although it may be on an ampler and diviner 
scale, ' above all that we can ask or think \ 

1 Individuality and Value, p. 268. 2 Ibid., p. 18. 



xii THE FORMULA ENLARGED 233 

It is obvious, moreover, that in transferring to the Abso- 
lute the dominant features of our own experience — in treat- 
ing it as essentially the completion or perfected expression 
of these — we are assuming much more than is warranted by 
the abstract, and at best purely intellectualistic, criterion of 
non-contradiction and inclusiveness with which we started. 
And if we return to Mr. Bradley, we soon find him using 
non-contradiction, harmony and satisfaction as alternative 
terms, and disposed, accordingly, to extract from his logical 
principle much more than it seems capable, in its natural 
meaning, of yielding. His Absolute is not merely an intel- 
lectually coherent whole ; it is perfect in every respect. ' I 
admit,' he says in the chapter introductory to the Second 
Book, in which he gives a preliminary description of the 
characteristics which Reality must possess, if it is to be 
accepted as the solution of the philosophical problem, ' or 
rather I would assert, that a result if it fails to satisfy our 
whole nature comes short of perfection. And I could not 
rest tranquilly in a truth, if I were compelled to regard it 
as hateful. ... If metaphysics is to stand, it must, I think, 
take account of all sides of our being. I do not mean that 
every one of our desires must be met by a promise of par- 
ticular satisfaction; for that would be absurd and utterly 
impossible. But if the main tendencies of our nature do 
not reach satisfaction in the Absolute, we cannot believe 
that we have attained to perfection and truth.' 1 ' We must 
believe \ he concludes, ' that reality satisfies our whole 
being. Our main wants — for truth and life and for beauty 
and goodness — must all find satisfaction.' 2 The conclu- 
sion is reiterated in the closing pages of the volume in 
the famous passage : ' We make mistakes, but still we 
use the essential nature of the world as our own criterion 
of value and reality. Higher, truer, more beautiful, better 
and more real — these on the whole count in the universe 
''Appearance and Reality, p. 146. 2 p. 158. 



234 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

as they count for us, and existence must correspond with 
our ideas.' * 

So far as I can recall, the enormous extension thus given 
to the formal principle of self-consistency is nowhere ex- 
pressly justified, except in a piece of reasoning which has 
always struck me as one of the weakest in the book. 
* There is no direct way ', he says, ' of showing that reality 
is perfect. . . . We cannot argue directly that all sides of 
our nature must be satisfied, but indirectly we are led to 
the same result ' ; for ' is it certain ', he asks, ' that the mere 
intellect can be self-satisfied if other elements of our nature 
remain not contented ? ' 2 The argument is made to turn 
almost entirely on practical discord in the form of pain or 
unsatisfied desire. The very ' idea of a better and non- 
existing condition of things must destroy theoretical rest ' ; 
and as ' we are forced to assume theoretical satisfaction, 
to suppose that existing one-sidedly and together with prac- 
tical discomfort appears inadmissible \ ' Pain, of course, is 
a fact, and no fact can be conjured away from the universe ; 
but the question is as to a balance of pain ', and it is only 
necessary to ' assume that in the Absolute there is a balance 
of pleasure, and all is consistent.' Surely, as an argument 
to prove the perfection of the universe, this transition from 
logical coherence or incoherence to psychical comfort or 
discomfort is one of the flimsiest bridges ever built by meta- 
physical subtlety, and I can hardly avoid the feeling of 
something half-hearted in the way in which Mr. Bradley 
puts it forward. He deals more worthily with the essentials 
of the question in a recent article in Mind/ one of the many 
to which criticism has compelled him during the last ten or 
twelve years. ' It is after all ', he says at the close of the 
article, ' an enormous assumption that what satisfies us is 

x p. 550. 2 pp. 155-8. 

8 On ' Coherence and Contradiction ' in Mind, October 1909, New 
Series, vol. xviii, p. 507 (reprinted in Essays on Truth and Reality, 
p. 243). 



xii THE ASSUMPTION INVOLVED 235 

real, and that the reality has got to satisfy us. It is an 
assumption tolerable, I think, only when we hold that the 
Universe is substantially one with each of us, and actually 
as a whole, feels and wills and knows itself within us. . . . 
And our confidence rests on the hope and the faith that, 
except as an expression, an actualization, of the one Real, 
our personality has not counted, and has not gone here to 
distort and vitiate the conclusion. . . . And, wherever this 
is felt, there is little desire to insist that what we want must 
be real exactly so as we want it. Whatever detail is neces- 
sary to the Good we may assume must be included in reality, 
but it may be included there in a way which is beyond our 
knowledge and in a consummation too great for our under- 
standing. On the other side, apart from the belief that the 
ultimate and absolute Real is actually present and working 
within us, what are we to think of the claim that reality is in 
the end that which satisfies one or more of us? It seems a 
lunatic dream. . . . The ideas and wishes of " fellows such 
as I crawling between heaven and earth,'' how much do they 
count in the march or the drift of the Universe?' 

It may easily be objected that there is something circular 
in the reasoning here. The validity of our assertions about 
the universe is to depend upon the view we hold of man's 
place in the universe or his relations to the Real; but that 
is the fundamental affirmation in the case, and how are we 
to be assured of its validity? To this it may be answered 
that the view here indicated of man's relation to the Real 
has behind it the whole weight of a philosophical system. It 
is the same view so strongly urged in last year's lectures, that 
man, as I expressed it, is organic to the world, and conversely 
the world is organic to man, completing itself in him, and 
manifestly coming to life and expression in his experience. 
Neither, if we consider rightly, can be so much as conceived 
apart from the other. For by man is meant, of course, not 
merely, or even specifically, the historical denizens of this 



236 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

planet, but sentient life flowering in the rational mind, in 
whatever ' where ' or ' when ' it comes to birth. And yet, 
if the critic were to press his objection, I would admit that 
there is an assumption involved in this philosophical theory, 
an assumption woven into its very texture, and without 
which, perhaps, the theory would never have been arrived 
at — I mean the conviction of the essential greatness of man 
and the infinite nature of the values revealed in his life. 
Without this absolute judgement of value, how could we 
argue, how could we convince ourselves that, in our esti- 
mates, it is not we who judge as finite particulars, but Reality 
affirming, through us, its inmost nature? It is not on the 
mere fact of consciousness or self-consciousness that we take 
our stand, but on the nature of the content experience, the 
inexhaustible wonder and greatness of the worlds which 
it opens up to us. Every form of philosophical idealism 
appears to involve this conviction of the profound signifi- 
cance of human life, as capable of appropriating and realiz- 
ing these values. And without such a conviction, argument 
about God or the universe would seem to be mere waste of 
time; for the man to whom his own life is a triviality is not 
likely to find a meaning in anything else. 

When we approach the question seriously, therefore, and 
not in a spirit of dialectical display, we find ourselves, 
I think, dismissing without more ado the insinuations of 
naturalistic evolution that our human values are no more 
than the forms taken by the instinctive self-affirmation of 
a particular animal species, and, consequently, quite irrele- 
vant in any discussion of the ultimate nature of reality. 
Glib theories of this description always remind me of Plato's 
account of those who have been introduced to philosophy 
too young, the boys who have tasted dialectic for the first 
time, and who delight, like puppies, in pulling and tearing 
to pieces with logic any one who comes near them. 1 If (to 

1 Republic, 539. 



xii THE ESSENTIAL GREATNESS OF MAN 237 

continue in Plato's words) we are ' resolved to discuss and 
examine truth, rather than to play at contradiction for 
amusement,' we see at once that, however gradual the tran- 
sition from one stage of consciousness to another, man's 
attainment of conceptual thought makes him an organ of 
the universe in a totally different sense from that in which 
any mere animal can be said to be so. As the old legend 
puts it, in the mouth of the Creator no less than on the word 
of the serpent, ' Alan is become as one of us, knowing good 
and evil.' We need not, as Locke said, ' put ourselves 
proudly at the top of things,' but, with thought, we are 
somehow at the centre : we have become freemen of the 
universe. ' Souls in general ', said Leibnitz in his peculiar 
phraseology, ' are living mirrors or images of the universe 
of created things, but spirits are also images of the divinity 
or of the author of nature himself, capable of knowing the 
system of the universe.' 1 

' Capable of knowing the system of the universe ' — science, 
philosophy, religion are all included in the phrase. The 

m animal soul reacts to its particular environment, and asks no 
questions; but the outlook of the rational mind is universal. 

- Man weighs in a balance the earth on which he moves, an 
insignificant speck; he calculates the distance, the mass, 
and the movements of the farthest stars ; he dissolves the 
solid framework of material things into a whirl of invisible 
elements and forces ; he traces the history of his own and 
of other worlds ' in the dark backward and abysm of time ' ; 
he foresees his own death and the death of his race. He 
asks the meaning of it all, and he names the name of God. 
Man alone philosophizes, and man is the only religious ani- 
mal. The omnipresence of religion in the human race, often 
remarked on, however rude in origin and however gross the 
superstitions with which it is first associated, is a symbol 
of the step from the finite particulars of the senses to the 
1 Monadology, section 83. 



2& THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

universal of thought. It is the beginning of the quest of 
God, and the quest means that God is present in a new way 
in the creature that undertakes it. ' Spirits alone ', says 
Leibnitz again, ' are made in His image, and are, as it were, 
of His race, or like children of the house, since they alone 
can serve him freely and act with knowledge, in imitation 
of the divine nature.' 1 

This view of man, it need hardly be added, is suggestive 
of anything else than of self-glorification. Mr. Bradley 
refers, in the context of the passage I have last quoted, to 
' that vapouring, new or old, about Humanity, which, if it 
were not ambiguous, would be hardly sane '. And one recalls 
Comte's foolish phrase about the heavens declaring the glory, 
not of God, but of Kepler and Newton, or that other about 
1 the regency of God during the long minority of Humanity ', 
and the echo of such things in Swinburne's ' Hymn to Man ' : 

Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of 
things. 

And Mr. Bradley has also in view, I doubt not, the more 
recent excesses of some Pragmatists and so-called Human- 
ists, those who speak ambiguously of a ' plastic ' world, of 
man as ' making ' both truth and reality, or who acclaim as 
the essence of modern humanity ' the desire and determina- 
tion to have a voice and a vote in the cosmic councils ', 2 who 
write articles on ' The Democratic Conception of God ', 3 in 
which they tell us that ' society, democratic from end to end, 
can brook no such class distinctions ' as the effete European 
contrast between God and man. But in examining the 
Religion of Humanity last year, we saw the fallacy involved 
in treating humanity as a self-contained entity, a kind of 
Absolute on its own account. Ideals would be impossible 

1 Quoted in Latta's Leibniz, p. 266 (note), from Gerhardt's edition of 
the Philosophical Works, vol. iv, p. 461. 

2 A. W. Moore, Pragmatism and its Critics, p. 72. 

8 H. A. Overstreet, Hibbert Journal, January 1913. 



xii THE NATURE OF OUR ASSURANCE 239 

to a self-contained finite entity. To frame an ideal and 
pursue it means the presence of the infinite in the finite 
experience: or, from the other side, it is the mark of the 
finite being who is partaker in an infinite life. All claims, 
therefore, made on man's behalf, must be based on the 
objectivity of the values revealed in his experience, and 
brokenly realized there. Man does not make values any 
more than he makes reality. The soul, in Plato's metaphor. 
' feeds upon ' truth, upon goodness, upon beauty: and these, 
being all infinite in their essence, humble, as well as exalt, 
the finite subject to whom they display their features. 

A few words more may be added as to the nature of 
the assurance with which we hold our position. The logical 
principle of non-contradiction, or, to express it more largely, 
the principle of intellectual coherence, we must and do 
accept as absolute. We accept it as a necessity of reason 
involved in the possibility of knowing anything — involved 
therefore in all practical living as well as in the immov- 
able belief in law or order which inspires all scientific 
investigation. And, needless to say, life and science alike 
vindicate the principle; all experience may be looked upon 
as its progressive verification. But if we ask what is the 
nature of our certainty that existence, the world of facts, is 
ultimately and throughout intellectually coherent — that we 
have to do, in short, not with a chaos but with a cosmos, 
a world whose laws may be infinitely complex and difficult 
to unravel, but which will never put us to permanent intel- 
lectual confusion — we are bound to reply that in a sense it is 
an unproved belief. It is unproved in the sense that we 
have not explored the whole of existence, and in the nature 
of the case can never hope to include all the facts within the 
net of reason. And hence it may perhaps be called a postu- 
late of reason, a supreme hypothesis. Many would describe 
it as a ' venture of faith ', and as such it has been luminously 



240 THE CRITERION OF VALUE lect. 

treated, as the first step in the theistic argument, by my 
own revered teacher, Professor Campbell Fraser, in his 
Gifford Lectures on the Philosophy of Theism. In a similar 
spirit Lotze speaks of ' the confidence of reason in itself ' as 
the faith which lies at the root of all knowledge. 

We have most of us, I suppose, as good moderns and 
children of the light, had our gibe at the ontological argu- 
ment, and savoured Kant's pleasantry of the hundred 
dollars. But this fundamental confidence of reason in 
itself is just what the ontological argument is really labour- 
ing to express — the confidence, namely, that thought, when 
made consistent with itself, is true, that necessary implica- 
tion in thought expresses a similar implication in reality. 
In this large sense, the truthfulness of thought — its ultimate 
truthfulness — is certainly the presupposition of all thinking : 
otherwise there could be no inducement to indulge in the 
operation. To that extent we all believe, as Mr. Bradley 
puts it in a rather incautious phrase, that ' existence must 
correspond with our ideas '. When I say, ' we all believe it/ 
I mean that it is the first and natural attitude of the mind to 
the world, that it never ceases to be our practical assump- 
tion, and that, although a little philosophy may lead us 
for a time into the wilderness of scepticism and relativism, 
depth in philosophy brings us back with fuller insight to 
the sanity of our original position. And Mr. Bradley's con- 
fidence that ' the main tendencies of our nature ' must 
' reach satisfaction in the Absolute ', or Professor Bosan- 
quet's readiness to ' stake [his] whole belief in reality . . . 
on the general " trueness and being " of whole provinces of 
advanced experience such as religion or morality or the 
world of beauty or of science ', is, in effect, an extension to 
our nature as a whole of the fundamental confidence ex- 
pressed in the ontological argument. We are more or less 
familiar with this claim to objectivity on behalf of the 
deliverances of the moral faculty. The voice of conscience 



xii THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 241 

is frequently referred to in popular philosophy as the voice 
of God. The claim is made by modern philosophy in a more 
general form, and because it has been more critically sifted, 
it is no doubt vaguer in its outcome than the old intuitional 
argument used to be. Fundamentally, it is the conviction 
that ' the best we think, or can think, must be ' — a form of 
statement which perhaps enables us to see the real intention 
of the old scholastic argument that ' a perfect being neces- 
sarily exists '. In other words, the possibilities of thought 
cannot exceed the actuality of being; our conceptions of the 
ideal in their highest range are to be taken as pointing to a 
real Perfection, in which is united all that, and more than, it 
has entered into the heart of man to conceive. 

Admittedly, however, such a conception transcends the 
empirical reality of man's own nature or of the factual world 
around him, just as the perfectly coherent intellectual whole 
transcends the achieved results of knowledge. And, so far, 
the argument seems parallel in the two cases ; in both there 
is an aspect of faith, and in both a similar claim to objec- 
tivity. But it is idle to deny that, although the belief in ulti- 
mate Goodness and Perfection at the heart of things may be 
held with a more passionate energy of conviction than the 
more colourless postulate of the intellect, it does not present 
itself to most minds with the same impersonal logical 
cogency. ' The ultimate identity of value and existence ' has 
been described as the great venture of faith to which mys- 
ticism and speculative idealism are committed. 1 It has often 
been described by religious thinkers as a ' wager \ It has 
been treated as not in the strict sense a conclusion of the 
intellect at all, but a decision of character given out of a 
man's own moral and religious experience. Hence Fichte, 
who as much as any man believed in the coercive demonstra- 
tions of thought, can say, describing the great philosophical 
antithesis between naturalism and idealism, ' the kind of 

1 In an article by Dean Inge in The Times Literary Supplement, 
March 20, 1913. 



242 THE CRITERION OF VALUE xn 

philosophy we choose depends upon the kind of men we are ' ; 
and Eucken in our own day, under the name of Activism, 
puts forward his ' spiritual Idealism ' as a problem to be 
worked out by each man for himself, a truth to be embraced 
by a supreme act of the personality, and proved true by its 
consequences for life. So, as we all remember, William 
James, in his spirit-stirring essay on the ' Will to Believe ', 
represents a man's theoretical conclusions as to the spiritual 
or non-spiritual character of the universe as a personal cleav- 
ing to the one alternative or the other, an act which has its own 
influence in validating for the cosmos the hypothesis adopted. 
But here we pass away from the point of view of religious 
idealism into a moral dualism or Zoroastrianism, and the 
discussion of such a position would lead us too far. But 
it may at least be said that on this path we are in danger 
of losing the meaning of truth altogether and forgetting 
the function of philosophy. Philosophy is not an effort to 
help the good cause in a cosmic duel, but an attempt to find 
out the truth about the universe — to find out, for example, 
whether it is such a duel or not. Hence, whatever aspect of 
faith may cling to a philosophical conclusion, it must be pre- 
sented as the conclusion of the reason upon a consideration 
of all the evidence and after due weight assigned to all the 
modes of our experience. It must be our reasonable faith, 
and I note how that expression, emphasizing both aspects of 
the case, occurs prominently even in a theory of Absolutism 
like Professor Bosanquet's, who also, as we saw in the pas- 
sage quoted, adopts the familiar metaphor of ' staking our 
whole belief in reality ' on the truth or trustworthiness of 
certain great provinces of our experience. ' We must be- 
lieve ' is Mr. Bradley's way of stating his ultimate conclu- 
sion; and if I commented on his frequent references to our 
ignorance of the ' how ', it was not that I questioned the pro- 
priety of the confession, but because of its incongruity with 
other dogmatic claims and pronouncements of the author. 



LECTURE XIII 

THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL 

According to the argument of the preceding lecture, it 
is from the ideals present and operative in man's life that 
we draw our criterion of value and, at the same time, our 
conviction of the nature of the system in which we live. In 
what follows, I wish particularly to insist that here too we 
are drawing upon experience. Man's experience is not 
limited, in the moral life, for example, to the ' is ' of his 
actual achievement, or, in the contemplation and production 
of the beautiful, to the beauty which the artist has succeeded 
in embodying in his poem, his painting, or his symphony. 
In Marlowe's great words : 

If all the pens that ever poets held 
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
Their minds and muses on admired themes : 
If all the heavenly quintessence they 'still 
From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
Wherein as in a mirror we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit : 
If these had made one poem's period, 
And all combined in beauty's worthiness, 
Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue can digest. 1 

And, as in the quest of beauty, so in the life of moral 
endeavour. The best and noblest looks up to a better and 

1 Cf . Sir Joshua Reynolds on the painter's ideal : ' The sight never 
beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it. It is an ideal residing in the 
breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart, and which 
he dies at last without imparting.' 



244 THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL lect. 

nobler; with a strange mingling of ardour and despair he 
strains his eyes towards an unapproachable perfection. 
Hence Browning's familiar paradox that life's success lies 
in its failures, and that the divine verdict, in contrast to the 
world's, is passed, not upon the paltry sum of a man's deeds 
and attainments, but upon the visions of goodness which 
were his own despair : 

What I aspired to be, 
And was not, comforts me. 

Such a passage requires, of course, to be read with under- 
standing. The question is not of the casual inoperative 
wish, or the formal acknowledgement of the more excellent 
way, on the part of those confirmed in self-indulgence. 
Obviously, where there is no attempt, there can be no 
failure. It is the vision of goodness which has pierced 
a man with a sense of his own unworthiness, the ideal after 
which he has painfully limped — it is of these things that the 
poet speaks. And what I am concerned to emphasize is 
simply that, according to a doctrine of immanence rightly 
understood, man's ' reach ' as well as his ' grasp ' must be 
taken into account; for the presence of the ideal in human 
experience is as much a fact as any other. It is, indeed, 
much more; it is the fundamental characteristic of that 
experience. 

This is frequently neglected. Philosophers are apt to 
treat human nature as a finite and strictly self-contained 
fact, exhaustively revealed in its past record or in its present 
achievement. This is the defect in Hume's otherwise just 
contention that every cause must be judged by its effects. 
We have no call, and no right, he argues, to attribute more 
intelligence or goodness to the causal principle of the uni- 
verse than we find actually exhibited in the facts as we see 
them. But finite premisses can never prove an infinite con- 
clusion ; the limited and partial goodness of which we have 



xiii HUME'S CHALLENGE 245 

historical experience cannot of itself justify us in treating 
the whole history as the operation of a Being of infinite 
goodness, wisdom, and benevolence. And so Cleanthes tells 
us, at a turn of the argument, that he has been apt to suspect 
the frequent repetition of the word infinite in theological 
writers to savour more of panegyric than of philosophy. 
We should get on better, he suggests, ' were we to rest con- 
tented with more accurate and more moderate expressions \ 
The facts, as Hume sees them, present a motley spectacle in 
which, to the dispassionate observer, evil may well seem on 
the whole predominant over good. 1 But this impression 
may be due, I would suggest, to the external attitude of the 
dispassionate spectator so characteristic of Hume. Just as 
his general argument is based on a consideration of ' the 
works of nature ', in which no account is taken of the char- 
acteristics of human nature, so when human phenomena do 
perforce come up for discussion, they are likewise judged 
as they would be by a spectator ab extra, necessarily limited 
in his data to overt manifestations, and ignorant of the 
conditions of the inner drama of which these actions are the 
outcome and, as it were, the external register. But in such 
moral experience, finite and even paltry as the outcome in 
word or deed may appear, there may be an infinite factor 
involved. How otherwise, indeed, can we explain the human 
capacity of choice and man's long struggle to rise above 
himself? Is it not just the power of framing (and conse- 
quently of following) an ideal which constitutes man's 
nature as a rational creature — which makes him more than 
an intermittent pulse of animal desire? Man's ideals are, in 
a sense, the creative forces that shape his life from within. 
They have brought him thus far, and they confer upon him 
the possibility of an endless advance. As Edward Caird 
puts it : ' Their prophecies may be truer than history, because 
they contain something more of the divine than history 
1 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Part XI. 



246 THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL lect. 

has expressed as yet, or perhaps than it ever can fully 
express.' x 

Whence, then, are these ideals derived and what is the 
meaning of their presence in the human soul? Whence 
does Man possess this outlook upon a perfect Truth and 
Beauty and an infinite Goodness, the world of empirical 
fact being, as Bacon says, in proportion inferior to the soul ? 
Man did not weave them out of nothing any more than he 
brought himself into being. * It is He that hath made 
us, and not we ourselves ' ; and from the same fontal 
Reality must be derived those ideals which are the master- 
light of all our seeing, the element, in particular, of our 
moral and religious life. The presence of the Ideal is the 
reality of God within us. This is, in essentials, the famous 
argument for the existence of God which meets us at the 
beginning of modern philosophy — the argument from the 
fact of man's possession of the idea of a Perfect Being, 
which forms the centre, indeed the abiding substance, of 
Descartes's philosophy. This idea, Descartes reminds us, is 
not just an idea which we happen to find as an individual 
item in the mind, like our ideas of particular objects. It is 
innate, he says, in his old-fashioned misleading terminology. 
He means that it is organic to the very structure of intelli- 
gence, knit up indissolubly with that consciousness of self 
which he treated as his foundation-certainty — so that our 
experience as self-conscious beings cannot be described with- 
out implying it. ' I must not imagine ', he says in the Third 

1 Evolution of Religion, vol. ii, p. 9. Caird is commenting upon the 
well-known passage in which Goethe sets the world of inner experience 
beside the larger cosmos revealed to us in perception, and in which he 
justifies the popular identification of the divine with the best that we 
know or can conceive : 

Im Innern ist ein Universum auch, 
Daher der Volker loblicher Gebrauch, 
Dass jeglicher das Beste was er kennt, 
Er Gott, ja seinen Gott, benennt. 



xiii THE IDEA OF A PERFECT BEING 247 

Meditation, ' that the conception of the infinite is got merely 
by negation of the finite. . . . On the contrary I plainly see 
that there is more reality in the infinite substance than 
in the finite substance, so much so that it may even be 
said that my consciousness of the infinite is in some sense 
prior to my consciousness of the finite — or, in other words, 
that my consciousness of God is prior to my consciousness 
of myself. For how could I doubt or desire, how could 
I be conscious, that is to say, that anything is wanting to 
me, and that I am not altogether perfect, if I had not 
within me the idea of a being more perfect than myself by 
comparison with whom I recognize the defects of my 
nature?' The finite self, in short, with which Descartes 
appeared to start as an absolute and independent certainty, 
is not really an independent being at all. It can neither 
exist nor be known in isolation: it knows itself only as 
a member of a larger life. The idea of God, Descartes 
says elsewhere, 1 originates along with the idea of self and 
is innate in the same sense as the latter. The absolutely 
finite, if the paradoxical expression may be pardoned, would 
be entirely shut up within the four walls of its independent 
entity : it would be a universe to itself with no consciousness 
of any Beyond, and of course, therefore, without the con- 
sciousness of higher or lower. But man is not finite in this 
sense. Man is by contrast a finite-infinite being, conscious 
of finitude only through the presence of an infinite nature 
within him. The possibility of aspiration, infinite dissatis- 
faction and its obverse, the capacity for infinite progress — 
these fundamental characteristics of the human and rational 
life are based by Descartes on the existence of a Perfect 
Being revealing himself in our minds. 

We need not follow Descartes in the mechanical and 
external details of his theory — I mean in the separation of 
the idea from the fact it represents, the treatment of it as an 
1 Towards the end of the Third Meditation, 



248 THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL lect. 

effect produced in the mind by an external cause — nor need 
we even be perturbed if doubts invade us whether we really 
do possess such a positive idea of an absolutely perfect 
Being as Descartes seems to assert, and whether it is this 
idea which we use as a standard of comparison. It has 
been made an objection to Descartes's argument that we 
know only degrees of more and less, as we find them in 
experience, and that by a process of idealization from these 
examples we frame the imagination of a Being indefinitely 
exceeding the greatest and the best we know, whom we 
finally proceed to clothe with superlatives as the absolutely 
Perfect Being. But, in point of fact, what more do we want 
for the purposes of the argument than is here conceded? 
We may well admit that we do not rightly know in what 
Perfection consists. It is something which we feel towards, 
whose characters we divine along the lines of our own high- 
est experiences; and our idea is, to the end, something 
approximative, a hint, a suggestion, a bare outline. If by a 
positive idea Descartes is supposed to mean a clear, precise, 
and adequate idea, then it is certain we possess no such idea 
of a Perfect Being. We should require to be God in order 
to construct it. But what Descartes really meant by his 
epithet was that the idea is not a mere negation — as if we 
simply clapped a ' not ' before the finite, and said that the 
infinite is what the finite is not. The idea is positive up to 
the very limits of conception, including all that is real in 
the finite and infinitely more. But that ' more ', although it 
is the moving spirit of life within us, we do not possess in 
terms of conscious experience or of thought till it is revealed 
to us bit by bit ' with the process of the suns ', and, it may 
often be, in the travail of our souls. 

Let it be frankly admitted, therefore, that we do not use 
the full-orbed conception as our direct criterion of value, 
because the full-orbed conception is not ours. The human 
idea of God or of perfection is, as Locke said in an apt phrase 



xiii THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 249 

of our idea of infinity, ' an endless growing idea,' 1 one which 
grows with man's own growth, acquiring fresh content from 
every advance in knowledge or in goodness, opening up 
fresh heights and depths to him who presses honestly for- 
ward ; but he who penetrates farthest will be the last to say 
that he has attained. We are never at the goal, but as we 
move, the direction in which it lies becomes more and more 
definite. The movement and the direction imply the goal; 
they define it sufficiently for our human purposes; and in 
direct experience we are never at a loss to know what is 
higher and what is lower, what is better and what is worse. 

A criticism of the ordinary form of what is called the 
cosmological argument leads us by a slightly different path 
to a similar result ; for again what we have is the argument 
from the less to the more, from the finite to the infinite. 
In form, it is the ordinary argument from effect to cause, 
from the empirically verified existence of the world — my 
own existence at the very least — to God as the cause which 
explains that existence. So we have it in Locke, for 
example: * Man has a clear conception of his own being; 
he knows certainly that he exists and is something. ... If, 
therefore, we know that thus there is some real being, and 
that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident 
demonstration that from eternity there has been something. 
. . . Again, a man finds in himself perception and knowl- 
edge, and as whatsoever is the first eternal being [cannot] 
give to another any perfection that it hath not, either actu- 
ally in itself or in a higher degree, it necessarily follows that 
the first eternal being cannot be matter but must be an 
eternal mind.' 2 

It is at this point that we are faced by Hume's rejoinder, 
already referred to : ' Whence can any cause be known but 

1 Essay, II. 17. 7. Cf. section 12: 'a growing and fugitive idea, still in 
a boundless progression that can stop nowhere ', and, in the end, ' very 
far from a positive complete idea' (section 15). 

2 Essay, IV. 10. 2-12. 



250 THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL lect. 

from its known effects ?' We reach along such a line of 
argument only sufficient power and sufficient intelligence 
to account for the tangled web of empirical fact; it is 
impossible, from finite and imperfect data as our premisses, 
to reach the infinite and perfect in our conclusion. But, 
as Hegel has justly pointed out, such a criticism of the 
reasoning misreads entirely the logic of religion and, indeed, 
the procedure of living thought in any sphere, which per- 
petually carries us in the conclusion beyond our premisses. 
Otherwise why reason at all, if there is no advance? The 
premisses have to be transformed, set in another light, in 
order to yield the conclusion. In the argument which we 
are considering, the finite empirical world is certainly our 
starting-point, but the defect of the ordinary syllogistic 
form, says Hegel, is that ' the starting-point is taken as a 
solid foundation and supposed to remain so throughout, left 
at last just as it was at the first ... as if we were reason- 
ing from one thing, which is and continues to be, to another 
thing which in like manner is \ But ' to think the phenom- 
enal world rather means to re-cast its form and transmute 
it into a universal'; and 'what men call the proofs, of 
God's existence are, rightly understood, [just] ways of 
describing and analysing the active course of thought, the 
mind thinking the data of the senses V Hence to the re- 
ligious man the passage from the finite to the infinite does 
not mean that the empirical world is ' anything more than 
the point of departure '. 2 It is, in fact, the contingence of 
the finite which is the whole nerve of the reasoning. As it 
has been put, the argument is not so much ' Because the con- % 
tingent is, therefore the necessary being is'; it is, rather, 
' Because the contingent is not, the necessary being is '. 3 It 
is because the finite facts in their dispersedness and muta- 
bility seem to be unable to stand alone, to have nothing 

1 Encyclopaedia, section 50. 

2 Philosophy of Religion, vol. iii, p. 287 (English translation). 

3 Cairo" s Critical Philosophy of Kant, vol. ii, p. 125. 



xiii FROM IMPERFECT TO PERFECT 251 

stable or permanently satisfactory about them, and to be 
riddled with discord and contradiction, that the mind seeks 
to pass beyond them, as fragmentary appearances, to a 
reality which it conceives as an abiding and harmonious 
whole. Hence the starting-point is cancelled, so far as its 
independent existence is concerned. ' The apparent means 
or stepping-stone vanishes,' and the finite is recognized as 
existing only in and through the infinite. This is not to be 
interpreted, however, Hegel urges, as if the finite were 
merely absorbed. It is the nature of the infinite to express 
itself in the finite; and the living fact is just this unity — the 
realization of the infinite in the finite and the recognition by 
the finite of its own groundedness in the infinite. 

The character of the reasoning is expressed in the name 
most commonly given to the argument — the argument a 
contingentia mundi — and Professor Bosanquet describes it, 
not unfairly, as ' the essential argument of metaphysics ' and 
as identical ' in all Idealist philosophies V The necessary, 
as opposed to the contingent in the argument, is, as he says, 
1 the stable, the satisfactory, the fiifiaior,' and the essence 
of the reasoning is an ' inference from the imperfection of 
data and premisses \ 2 It is what he calls ' the spirit of 
totality ', working within us, which carries us forward. The 
same idea of the spirit of the whole is the fundamental mean- 
ing of Aristotle's great doctrine of the First Mover, operative 
in the universe as desire or love, and so, through the quest of 
satisfaction and self-completion, drawing all things to itself. 
It is what we desire — what we are not, but what we have the 
power to become — that is the moving power in all advance. 

Our destiny, our being's heart and home, 
Is with infinitude, and only there; 
With hope it is, hope that can never die, 
Effort, and expectation, and desire, 
And something evermore about to be. 3 
1 Individuality and Value, p. 262. 2 Ibid., p. 267. 

3 Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book VI. 



252 THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL lect. 

Hence the ideal is precisely the most real thing in the 
world; and those ranges of our experience, such as religion, 
which are specifically concerned with the ideal, instead of 
being treated as a cloud-cuckoo-land of subjective fancy, 
may reasonably be accepted as the best interpreters we have 
of the true nature of reality. And certainly in no sphere of 
our experience is the implication of objectivity — the ' truth- 
claim ', as it has been called — more insistent, one might say, 
more overwhelming, than just in the moral and religious life. 
Reverence for the moral law, the self-humiliation caused by 
failure to fulfil its demands, the sense of sin, the attitude 
of worship and utter self-surrender, are possible only if the 
subject feels himself in presence of a Reality beside which 
all else pales into insignificance. And it is to the moral and 
religious man himself that we must go, not to the philoso- 
pher weaving theories about him, if we are to understand 
his experience aright. The religious man's account of his 
experience may be overlaid with accretions and survivals 
of primitive custom and belief; and on these accessories 
philosophical criticism and historical research have their 
legitimate work to do. But the fundamental presupposi- 
tions of any experience must be accepted from the experi- 
ence itself : they may be explained, but not explained away. 
On the evidence of the moral and religious life, therefore, 
we are bound to treat the ideals of that life not as devout 
imaginations, in which fancy has combined with desire to 
heighten and idealize certain features of the actual, but as 
having their authentic basis in the nature of the world. In 
Mr. Bradley's words : ' There is nothing more real than what 
comes in religion. To compare facts such as these with what 
comes to us in outward existence would be to trifle with the 
subject. The man who demands a reality more solid than 
that of the religious consciousness knows not what he seeks.' * 

The presence and power of the Ideal is the solution of 
appearance and Reality, p. 449. 



xin IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE 253 

the question at issue in the ever-renewed debate between 
immanence and transcendence. Without the acknowledge- 
ment of the Ideal, a doctrine of immanence must degenerate 
into an acceptance and justification of the actual, just as 
we find it. In Pope's shallow phrase, ' whatever is, is right \ 
This is the lower Pantheism, of which we spoke in the first 
lecture of this series; and it is to be observed that such a 
theory, by ascribing everything that happens to the direct 
or immediate agency of God, is a virtual denial of the exist- 
ence of reflective self-conscious, spiritual centres, such as we 
know them in our own experience. For although we often 
talk, in a legitimate metaphor, of individuals as the vehicle 
or the channel of certain divine ideas or purposes, the self- 
conscious individual must appropriate the idea in order to 
^transmit it; he must identify himself with the purpose in 
order to be its instrument. On the theory which we are 
criticizing, however, the metaphor is taken as literal fact, 
and such self-reference is no more possible to the individual 
centre than it is to the water-pipe in respect of the water 
which courses through it. We are all divine automata, with 
at most a passive sentience of what goes on within us, en- 
during the course of events as they happen. Immanence, 
so understood, reduces both God and man to meaningless 
terms, for God becomes simply a collective name for a world 
of things which simply exist. In such a world there is not 
room even for the most ordinary case of desire-prompted 
action ; for desire, as distinguished from recurrent appetite, 
implies the idea of a better. And the idea of a better means 
the idea of the self as finding satisfaction in a state of things 
different from its actual situation. Paltry or evanescent as 
the particular satisfaction may be, we have in such simple 
experiences the origin of the ideal self, the conception of 
which, as a permanent and authoritative object of desire, 
it is the function of experience in the individual and in the 
race to develop and organize. Apart from this capacity of 



254 THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL lect. 

self-reference, there can be no ideals, but only bare facts. 
And if the lower Pantheism is justly criticized as being 
indistinguishable from Atheism, the reason is that there can 
be no true doctrine of God which is not based on a true 
doctrine of man. Now the essence of human nature is just, 
as the poet expresses it, 

Effort and expectation and desire 

And something evermore about to be — 

the contrast between the actual present and the unrealized 
future, passing into the deeper contrast between the ' is ' 
and the ' ought-to-be ', and the duality of what is commonly 
called the lower and the higher self, with the discord and 
the struggle thence resulting. 

The process of such a life is explicable only through the 
actual presence within it, or to it, of the Perfection to which 
it aspires. Theories of the sheer transcendence of the divine 
defeat their own object, because the very exaltation of the 
divine into an inaccessible Beyond confers a spurious inde- 
pendence or self-existence upon the finite. It is treated as 
existing in its own right. But as soon as we begin to treat 
God and man as two independent facts, we lose our hold 
upon the experienced fact, which is the existence of the one 
in the other and through the other. Most people would prob- 
ably be willing to admit this mediated existence in the case 
of man, but they might feel it akin to sacrilege to make the 
same assertion of God. And yet, if our metaphysic is, as 
it professes to be, an analysis of experience, the implication 
is strictly reciprocal. God has no meaning to us out of rela- 
tion to our own lives or to spirits resembling ourselves in 
their finite grasp and infinite reach; and, in the nature of 
the case, we have absolutely no grounds for positing his 
existence out of that reference. 

I have commented in a previous lecture — in connexion 
with Kant and Martineau — on the unworkableness of a 



xiii THE CREATION OF A SOUL 255 

purely transcendent theory, and in the sequel I hope to 
deal more explicitly with what I hold to be the true concep- 
tion of the divine life. In the present connexion it may be 
sufficient to suggest that the transcendence which must be 
retained, and which is intelligible, refers to a distinction of 
value or of quality, not to the ontological separateness of 
one being from another. It refers, as we have seen in this 
lecture, to the infinite greatness and richness of the contain- 
ing Life, as compared with anything as yet appropriated by 
the finite creature. But the creation of a soul is not com- 
parable to the manufacture of an article, which remains 
throughout something separate from its maker, and which 
is dismissed, when finished, to do the specific work for which 
its designer has fitted it. It may be more fitly represented 
by the addition of a child to a family. But it is something 
more intimate still ; for the filaments which unite the finite 
spirit to its creative source are never severed. The Pro- 
ductive Reason remains at once the sustaining element of 
the dependent life, and the living content, continually offer- 
ing itself to the soul which it has awakened to the knowl- 
edge and the quest of itself. 



LECTURE XIV 
THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE INDIVIDUAL 

The Ideal was treated in the preceding lecture as the 
infinite present in the finite, and we thus naturally found 
ourselves involved towards the close in the general question 
of the relation of the finite individual to the creative prin- 
ciple of its life. I propose, in this lecture and the one which 
follows, to deal with this subject — to discuss what I may 
call the status of the finite individual — mainly in the light 
of its recent treatment by Professor Bosanquet in his 
suggestive volume on The Value and Destiny of the 
Individual, with such reference as may be called for to 
Mr. Bradley's doctrine in Appearance and Reality and the 
theories of Spinoza and Hegel, in which Professor Bosan- 
quet's treatment will generally be found to have its roots. 
I believe that a consideration of Professor Bosanquet's posi- 
tion is likely to prove especially helpful, because in both 
his Gifford volumes he adopts Keats's description of the 
world as ' the vale of soul-making ', and frequently speaks 
in that sense as if the moulding of individual souls were the 
typical business of the universe, while at the same time the 
strong monistic trend of his thinking tends to carry him in 
an opposite direction — to the view that ' the formal distinct- 
ness ' of finite selves is an appearance due to ' impotence ' 
and incidental to their finitude. From this point of view 
the blending or fusion of individual selves in an absolute 
experience becomes (according as we regard it) either the 
consummation of their effort and apparent progress in time, 
or the timeless reality to which that appearance corresponds. 

It will be well, at the outset, to indicate the points on 
which we are agreed, more especially as certain utterances 



xiv FALSE NOTIONS OF THE SELF 257 

of my own in the past have been understood as a typical 
and extreme expression of what I suppose Professor Bosan- 
quet means by ' an irrational Personalism ', that is, as he 
explains, the notion of ' the personal self as an exclusive 
entity, simply living out a nature of its own V or, again, 
what he calls ' the unreflecting attitude which accepts 
[finite selves or persons] as fundamentally isolated self- 
subsistent beings, externally connected, but not in any 
genuine sense parts of the same stuff or elements in the 
same spirit \ 2 Such phrases may perhaps describe accu- 
rately the old doctrine of the soul-substance as a kind of 
metaphysical atom, which served as substrate or point of 
attachment for the individual's experiences; and so far as 
these experiences are regarded by any thinker as subjective 
processes going on within this substance, as in a kind of 
closed internal space, so far we might characterize his con- 
ception of the self as that of an exclusive entity living out 
a nature of its own. Among recent treatments, Dr. McTag- 
gart's theory of personal identity, based on identity of 
substance, has certain obvious affinities with the theory 
criticized. Dr. McTaggart does, indeed, expressly describe 
the self as ' a substance existing in its own right ' ; 3 though 
he more usually speaks of it as a fundamental and eternal 
differentiation of the Absolute, which is treated as the unity 
or society of such persons, without being itself a person. 
Or, again, we found Martineau, in his insistence on the 
transcendence of the Divine as the source of obligation, 
speaking of the ' unitary ' nature of personality as occupy- 
ing one side of a given relation and unable to be also on 
the other, and using such phrases as ' an insulated nature ', 
a being existing * within the enclosure of his detached per- 
sonality \ 4 Such expressions, as we saw, were connected 

1 Value and Destiny of the Individual, pp. 32-3. 2 Ibid., p. 46. 

" Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 37. 
* Cf. Lecture II, supra, pp. 36-7. 



258 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

with the externally deistic conception of God and the cor- 
respondingly individualistic conception of man which, on 
the whole, dominate Martineau's formal philosophy. But 
a closer inspection shows that these phrases are applied, to 
the hypothetical case of ' one lone man in an atheistic 
universe'; and if we recall Martineau's frequent designa- 
tion of God, in his philosophy of religion, as ' the soul of all 
souls ', we see that they cannot be intended to apply in any 
literal sense to the relations of the divine to the human, as 
they exist and are experienced in the actual universe. Still, 
even to put forward the hypothetical case is evidence of 
defective philosophical insight. For the mere individual 
nowhere exists; he is the creature of a theory. 

A self can exist only in vital relation to an objective 
system of reason and an objective world of ethical observ- 
ance from which it receives its content, and of which it is, 
as it were, the focus and depositary. Apart from these it 
would be a bare point of mere existence. Historically, the 
individual is organic to society, to which he is sometimes 
said to be subsequent; for, in the light of history, it is not 
altogether unmeaning to speak, as Professor Bosanquet does, 
of 'the genesis' — so to speak, the / crystallizing ' — of the 
individual soul out of the collective soul of the primitive 
community; the genesis, at any rate, of anything worthy 
to be called self-consciousness. Apart from questions of 
origin, it is certainly true that it is only by a convenient 
(though often misleading) abstraction that we can discuss 
the nature and conduct of the individual apart from the 
social whole in which he is, as it were, imbedded, and of 
which he appears to be the product. And as the individual 
is organic to society, so in still larger philosophical refer- 
ence the individual is organic to a universal life or world, 
of which he is similarly a focus, an organ or expression. 
And he cannot possibly be regarded as self-contained in 
relation to that life, for such self-containedness would mean 



xiv ' NOW AND HERE IN THE ABSOLUTE ' 259 

sheer emptiness. Both his existence and his nature (his 
1 that ' and his ' what ') are derived. It is absurd to talk of 
him as self-subsistent or existing in his own right. He exists 
as an organ of the universe or of the Absolute, the one 
Being ; and from the same source he draws his rational and 
spiritual content, ' feeding ', as Plato says, ' on mind and 
pure knowledge, the proper food of every soul V 

Hence, as Professor Bosanquet rightly, more than once, 
insists, ' the finite self, like everything in the universe, is now 
and here beyond escape an element in the Absolute '. 2 Or, if 
we use the more concrete terms of religion, we may say that 
no act of creation is conceivable or possible which should 
extrude us from the life of God and place us, as solitary 
units, outside the courses of his being. The individual self, 
in other words, does not exist ' strong in solid singleness ', 
like a Lucretian atom. The currents of the divine life course 
through it; it is open to all the influences of the universe. 
As we have already seen, 3 how should we explain the fact of 
progress, if not by this indwelling in a larger life — this con- 
tinuity with what is more and greater than ourselves ? And 
it is from the fact that the finite individual is thus rooted in 
a wider life, to whose influences it remains throughout acces- 
sible, that those visitings of grace, of which the religious 
consciousness testifies, become most easily intelligible — as 
well as those more violent upheavals of the personality as we 
have known it, in which, as religion says, the man is born 
again and becomes a new creature. And because, so long as 
it exists, every self remains in principle thus accessible, the 
possibility of such regeneration remains open to the most 
abandoned or degraded. For which of us knows his own 
self and its possibilities, whether for good or for evil? 
According to the saying of M. Bergson, which Professor 
Bosanquet is fond of quoting, ' Nous ne nous tenons jamais 

1 Phaedrus, 247. 2 Value and Destiny, p. 257. 

8 Lecture II. 



260 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

tout entiers ' : we never possess ourselves entirely. If we 
could, we should be, I suppose, either the Absolute in propria 
persona, or Browning's ' finite clod, untroubled by a spark ', 
the unchanging atom of a false theory. 

But, to realize the presence of the universal in the indi- 
vidual (or the life of the individual in the universal, accord- 
ing as we choose to express the organic or inherent relation 
which unites them), it is not necessary to go beyond Profes- 
sor Bosanquet's simple instance from everyday life, the bare 
fact of argument or discussion. ' No one ever dreams ', he 
says, ' of acting on the assumption that a mind is for itself, 
especially at a given moment of time, all that it is in itself. 
If this were the case, we should never argue or persuade. 
For to argue or to persuade is to rely on factors of the mind 
which are at the moment not explicit, and which we desire 
to evoke into explicitness.' * It is the same thought which 
Plato expresses in the Meno in the quasi-mythical doctrine 
of Reminiscence, which, reduced by himself to philosophical 
prose, assures us that ' all Nature is akin ' and, therefore, for 
the rational mind any actual knowledge is so linked with 
other truths as to be capable of carrying us ultimately to the 
end of the intellectual world, that is, to the systematic 
knowledge of the whole. Thus any knowledge is the possi- 
bility of all knowledge, or, in his actual words, ' the soul can 
elicit all out of a single recollection, if a man is strenuous 
and does not faint '. 

All this, then, is common ground, and common also is (or 
appears to be) the conviction that in the making of souls we 
have the typical business, or, as one might put it, the central 
interest of the universe. ' The universe ', said Professor 
Bosanquet in the opening lecture of his first course, 'is not 
a place of pleasure, nor even a place compounded of proba- 
tion and justice; it is, from the highest point of view con- 
cerned with finite beings, a place of soul-making. Our best 

1 Valu-e and Destiny, p. 60. 



xiv 'FORMAL DISTINCTNESS OF SELVES' 261 

experience carries us without hesitation thus far. ... It is 
the moulding and the greatness of souls that we really care 
for.' 1 And in his second volume the phrase and the idea 
are made central. But in spite of this, there is at various 
points in the book, as I have already hinted, something 
curiously grudging in his treatment of what he calls ' the 
formal distinctness of selves or souls '. 2 The term is used 
always, I think, with a tone of depreciation, as if this were 
a feature which one is, indeed, forced to recognize, but rather 
as a limitation to be overcome than as part of the funda- 
mental structure of the universe — what one might perhaps 
term the fundamental method of creation. ' No one ', we 
are told, ' would attempt to overthrow this formal distinct- 
ness — consisting in the impossibility that one finite centre 
of experience should possess, as its own immediate experi- 
ence, the immediate experience of another.' But it is sug- 
gested that it ' depends on what are at bottom unessential 
limitations, such as the fact of differences of vital feeling, 
depending as a rule on the belonging of different selves to 
different bodies ' ; and ' if the hindrance against two selves 
having the same immediate experience could be removed, 
the result involved would be the coalescence of the two selves 
into one '. So, again, we are told that this formal distinct- 
ness is ' no doubt inevitable on the assumption that there are 
to be finite individuals, because, if the centres ceased to have 
the different bases of feeling that keep them from merging, 
they would be one without distinction and there would be no 
two experiences to blend '. Nevertheless. ' its nature seems 
not wholly fundamental nor irreducible '. And later the 
conclusion is reached that ' while we may venture to say 
that we see a use and convenience in this system of finite 
experiences . . . we are aware of its precarious and super- 

1 Individuality and T T alue, p. 26. 

J Value and Destiny, p. 47 (in the second lecture, where this grudging- 
ness is specially noteworthy throughout). 



262 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

ficial nature \ * A completer unity of finite minds in one 
would bring us at once to a partial Absolute, and necessitate 
a transformation of the differences which now suffice to 
keep finite minds distinct ' ; but this, it is indicated, would 
not serve the purposes of 'everyday life'. 'But, again (he re- 
peats), we are aware of the precarious and superficial nature 
of their distinctness, and at every point we meet with indica- 
tions that something deeper and more real underlies them.' * 
The attitude revealed in such expressions, and the con- 
stantly recurring conception of blending or merging, as the 
superior ideal or goal, seem to me very significant as bearing 
on the ultimate outcome of a rigidly absolutist theory, and 
I will return to consider them in that reference. But we 
must first, in justice both to Professor Bosanquet and to 
ourselves, take note of the main considerations on which he 
bases this view of the unimportance of the distinctness of 
selves and, as it would seem, its progressive disappearance. 
These considerations are indicated in the reference in the 
passage last quoted to something deeper and more real which 
underlies the individual selves. And in what has already 
been said about the universal in which the individual lives, 
and from which he draws his sustenance, I have emphasized 
in advance my adhesion to the valuable truth which Pro- 
fessor Bosanquet enforces. What I deny is its relevance to 
the suggested view of finite selfhood as a vanishing distinc- 
tion. Professor Bosanquet's polemic is directed against the 
tendency to over-emphasize the exclusiveness of the self, as 
if it were in the assertion of its bare self-identity and differ- 
ence from others that the self realized its true being; and it 
is characteristic of his argument that he construes any state- 
ment of the focal difference or separateness of selves as 
implying the denial of any common aims or common content, 
in short, the denial of any common life in the whole. And as 
against such a view he has no difficulty in showing that the 
1 Value and Destiny, pp. 47, 48, 54, 58. 



xiv SELVES SHARE A COMMON CONTENT 263 

value of a self, or, in his own phrase, its reality, lies in its 
content, and that this depends just on the extent to which it 
appropriates a common heritage of ideas and interests. The 
life of the finite individual, as it builds up its true self, is 
thus a continual process of self-transcendence; its true per- 
sonality or individuality does not lie in unshareable feelings, 
but in the richness and variety of its thoughts and interests. 
It is not an abstract point of particularity; it is, or rather, 
it makes itself, a little world, a microcosm. But the con- 
tents of such a self — and every actual self is in its degree 
such a self — are essentially shareable. In social interests 
and purposes the individual becomes one with his fellows; 
and in science and philosophy, religion and art, he shares 
those universal interests which are the common heritage of 
humanity — which in the most literal sense make us men. It 
is obvious, therefore, that there must be an identity of con- 
tent in all selves, and that the extent of this identity may 
vary indefinitely as between different selves, ' large numbers 
of consciousnesses ' being indeed, as he says, ' completely 
coincident for the greater proportion of their range ' — so 
much so as to suggest the difficulty of understanding * what 
was to be gained by so immense a multiplication of contents 
all but identical '. In this reference we may quite intelligibly 
talk, as Professor Bosanquet does, of ' the overlapping of 
intelligences ', inasmuch as ' the formal diversity of finite 
centres is not at all thoroughly sustained and reinforced by a 
coincident diversity of the matter of their experience V But 
to add, as he does, that the formal diversity is ' in some 
degree reacted on and impaired ' by the partial identity is, I 
submit, to state what may be true as the author intends it, in 
a form which opens the way to serious error. For it is quite 
clear that the formal distinctness of selves is not at all 
' impaired ' — not affected at all — by the extent of the knowl- 

1 Ibid., p. 56. Cf . p. 53 : ' Their contents overlap in the most irregular 
and fluctuating way.' 



264 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

edge they have in common, or of the sympathies they share. 
The fabric of two minds may, as Professor Bosanquet has 
suggested, be so nearly identical that the one seems to redu- 
plicate the other rather than to supplement it, and yet they 
remain two minds to the end of the chapter. Finite centres 
may ' overlap ' indefinitely in content, but, ex vi termini, 
they cannot overlap at all in existence; their very raison 
d'etre is to be distinct and, in that sense, separate and exclu- 
sive focalizations of a common universe. 

It is not conceivable, of course, that Professor Bosanquet 
means to deny such a commonplace. He allows, indeed, at 
the outset, that ' individuality or personality has an aspect 
of distinct unshareable immediacy, [although] in substance, 
in stuff and content, it is universal, communicable, expan- 
sive '. But the suggestion of the argument throughout is 
the unimportance of this aspect. It may be a necessary 
condition of finiteness, but finiteness, we are distinctly told. 
' lies in powerlessness ' ; and we noted how the expansion of 
the self and its identification of itself with other selves in 
common interests and movements repeatedly suggested to 
the author the idea of blending or merging as the consum- 
mation of the process of enlargements and a kind of emanci- 
pation from the de facto limitations of individuality as we 
know it. This is brought out still more strongly, if possible, 
in the author's summary of the lecture. ' There is no rule as 
to how far " persons " can overlap in their contents. Often 
a little change of quality in feeling, it seems, would all but 
bring them into one. It is impotence, and no mysterious 
limitation that keeps them apart. At their strongest they 
become confluent, and we see how they might be wholly so.' * 

1 Ibid., p. xxi (italics mine). Cf. again in one of the summaries of 
the previous volume : ' There would be no gain in wiping out the distinc- 
tion between one self and another in finite life; our limitations them- 
selves no doubt have a value. Still, in principle, our limitations are 
merely de facto ; there is no hard barrier set that can make our being 
discontinuous with others or with the perfect experience ' (Individuality 
and Value, p. xxxi). 



xiv ' CONFLUENCE ' OF SELVES 265 

The whole stress is laid, in this chapter and again in Chap- 
ter IX where ' the destiny of the finite self ' is discussed, 
upon the objective and impersonal content as distinguished 
from the personalities in which it is focused or realized. 
' The social fabric or any of the great structures in which 
spiritual achievement takes shape, e. g. knowledge, fine art, 
historical continuity of the constitutional system of a 
country ' — ' solid fabrics ' or ' organic structures ' such as 
these — ' are the certain, intelligible and necessary thing ', 
the ' something deeper and more real ' of which he spoke 
as underlying the ' precarious and superficial ' system of 
finite experiences. 1 

My argument does not require me to deny what is true in 
this way of putting the case. These great supra-individual 
creations impress us all with a sense of permanent, or at 
least, of age-long reality. The structure of a national civil- 
ization and the traditions which constitute a nation's life 
seem real in a sense which transcends and overshadows the 
reality of any individual citizen of to-day, or any of the 
nameless generations of the past, of whose lives it is, as it 
were, the abiding product. The time has gone by when it 
was possible to speak of such things as mere abstractions: 
it is the individual who is apt to appear an abstraction when 
set over against them. And so he is when set over against 
them ; for, as we have abundantly seen, it is only in them — 
as participating in them — that he has any concrete reality. 
But if we are not to forget the fundamental structure of the 
world, the counter-stroke must also be delivered. The uni- 
versal is no less an abstraction, if it is taken as real, or 
as possessing substantive existence, independently of the 
individuals whose living tissue it is. They realize them- 
selves through it ; it realizes itself in them. Thus a social 
whole is the sustaining life of its individual members, but it 

1 Value and Destiny, pp. 53-4. 



266 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

melts into thin air if we try to treat it as an entity apart 
from them. Exclusive emphasis on the one side or the other 
is the explanation of the perennial duel between individual- 
istic and organic theories of society or between nominalism 
and realism, pluralism and monism, in the wider field of 
philosophy. Now, although Professor Bosanquet certainly 
would not challenge the Aristotelian doctrine of the concrete 
universal just enunciated, the strongly monistic trend of his 
thought leads him, as we have seen, to treat the individual, 
qua individual, almost as a negligible feature of the world, 
and in the issue, consequently, as we shall see later, to treat 
the finite self as a transitory phenomenon. 

But this, I venture to urge, is entirely to mistake and to 
underrate the place which individuation holds in the struc- 
ture of the universe, and, consequently, as I suggested, to be 
untrue to the position apparently adopted, which treats soul- 
making as the essential business of the universe. It is no 
doubt true, as Professor Bosanquet remarks, 1 that ' we 
cannot expect to give a reason for the scheme of the uni- 
verse ' ; but we ought, at least, to be able to see a reason or a 
reasonableness in it, if our philosophy is to carry us through. 
And to leave the whole question of ' why the finite world 
exists ' as, in the main, a mystery, would seem to indicate 
some defect in the conception either of the individual or of 
the Absolute, or perhaps of both. 

Let us consider first, then, what is meant, or what we 
ought to mean, by an individual. I will start from an inci- 
dental remark of Professor Bosanquet's, in which he pro- 
tests against the phrase ' numerical identity ', commonly used 
in this connexion. In the sentence I refer to, he speaks of 
accentuating ' the positive self of content, at the expense of 
formal distinctness, or what I call under protest numerical 
identity \ 2 If I understand Professor Bosanquet's objection 
to the phrase, I take his contention to be that individuality is 
1 Value and Destiny, p. 61. 2 Ibid., p. 287. 



xiv THE IDENTITY OF INDISCERNIBLES 267 

ultimately a matter of content, and that individual differ- 
ences, consequently, must be so explained. Form is not like 
an empty case into which a certain content may be put : it is 
the structure and organization of the content itself. Indi- 
viduals are formally distinct, therefore, not because a more 
or less identical content has been thrust into so many empty 
cases which have afterwards had a numerical label, or a 
proper name, attached to them for convenience of reference. 
Individuals of a species are not comparable to articles turned 
out by a machine, each of which seems an exact repetition 
of its predecessors. They are formally distinct, because 
they are really different; and, no doubt, if we made our 
analysis fine enough, the manufactured articles also would 
turn out to be only practically and approximately iden- 
tical in quality and structure. For I accept the principle 
of the identity of indiscernibles as necessarily true of all 
real existences. Things are distinguished by their natures; 
they are different wholes of content. And even if we 
make space and time the principium individuationis and try 
to reduce the formal distinctness of individuals to differ- 
ence of position in the spatio-temporal series, such difference 
of position means a changed relation to the rest of the uni- 
verse, an exposure to different influences and a consequent 
difference in the resulting nature. And space and time may 
be regarded ultimately as only a mode of expressing the 
general fact of individuation — the fact that there are finite 
centres at all. 

It follows, then, that every individual is a unique 
nature, a little world of content which, as to its ingre- 
dients, the tempering of the elements and the system- 
atic structure of the whole, constitutes an expression or 
focalization of the universe w r hich is nowhere exactly 
repeated. Appearances to the contrary are due to super- 
ficial observation and want of interest in the object observed. 
To take the common instance : the sheep which to the 



268 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

ordinary passer-by are only so many numerable units, are 
known as real individuals, by differences of feature and 
character, to the shepherd who lives with his flock and 
enters into their life. And the higher we go in the animal 
scale, the more this uniqueness of the individual life 
is emphasized. It is expressed with rare beauty and 
pathos in Matthew Arnold's lines on the death of his little 
dachshund : 

And not the course 
Of all the centuries yet to come, 
And not the infinite resource 
Of Nature, with her countless sum 

Of figures, with her fullness vast 
Of new creation evermore, 
Can ever quite repeat the past 
Or just thy little self restore. 

And when we pass to man, a Nietzsche may consign the 
masses of the race ' to the devil and statistics ' x as ' blurred 
copies on bad paper and from worn-out plates ', but mankind, 
it has been more finely said, ' is all mass to the human eye, 
and all individual to the divine '. 2 If not to Nietzsche's 
diseased extent, we are all prone to something of the same 
feeling. Most of us, I fancy, have had our moods of depres- 
sion before the vast monotony of human conditions and 
human types, and have felt ourselves glutted by nature's 
endless fecundity. But that may be our mistake, as sug- 
gested in the saying just quoted. It needs, in fact, only a 
little sympathy and imagination to see, as Wordsworth says, 

into the depth of human souls, 
Souls that appear to have no depth at all 
To careless eyes. 

William James, in a delightful paper in his Talks to Teachers, 
entitled ' On a certain Blindness in Human Beings ', dis- 
courses, with the aid of a famous quotation from Stevenson, 

1 In the essay on History in his Unzeitgem'dsse Betrachtungen. 

1 Mozley, University Sermons, p. 121, at the close of a sermon on War. 



xiv A UNIQUE WHOLE OF CONTENT 269 

on our ordinary lack of this imaginative sympathy, which 
makes our fellow-beings mere outsides for us; and in his 
essay on Human Immortality he returns to emphasize the 
narrowness and stupidity of such an attitude, in particular 
the stupidity of imposing upon the universe or upon God our 
own incapacity, our limited sympathy and interest. And, in 
fact, there is nothing more characteristic of the religious 
attitude that the sense of a Divine Companion, whose perfect 
comprehension is the pledge of a sympathy as perfect, a sym- 
pathy to which we appeal with confidence even where we 
might hesitate in regard to those nearest to us and most dear. 
But this is carrying us away from our immediate point, 
which was the nature of the individual as a whole of content, 
constituting a unique focalization or expression of the Abso- 
lute, and thus making its unique contribution to the life of 
the whole. The line of thought into which we have glided 
has seemed to suggest that this uniqueness of function or 
contribution might carry with it the conservation or perma- 
nence of the finite whole as such. But Professor Bosanquet, 
although in objecting to the phrase numerical identity he 
appears to emphasize the qualitative uniqueness of the indi- 
vidual, and although he frequently speaks of the ' con- 
tribution ' made by the finite self to ultimate reality (it is 
indeed one of his favourite expressions), seems constantly 
to imply that this is to be conceived as the contribution of 
an ' element ' or quality, some peculiar flavour or tang, to 
a universal experience — not as consisting in its own total 
living reality as a specific incarnation, a centre into which the 
Absolute has poured its own being. And it is in accordance 
with this view that the finite individual is represented as 
yielding its contribution like a perfume exhaled in the very 
dissolution of its private being. 

Odours, when sweet violets sicken, 
Live within the sense they quicken. 
This is clearly stated in an important new chapter in the 



270 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

second edition of his Logic, 1 which is in the nature of a 
reply to criticisms by Professor Stout and Professor Taylor. 
It is true that the statement to which I refer is made of the 
animal mind, but animal minds are expressly taken as ' an 
extreme case ' of ' the imperfect individual ' in general, that 
is to say, of ' all finite individuals ' ; and what is said of the 
dog applies in principle to every finite subject. ' No one who 
has loved a dog ', 2 says Professor Bosanquet, ' can doubt 
that its mind has a value of the same kind, if remotely the 
same, as his own. No one, on the other hand, can well 
suppose that it has the distinctness and organization of 
content which we should expect of anything that is to have 
a permanent place of its own as a separate member of the 
system of reality. Surely the solution must be of the general 
type which conceives this partial mind as contributing a 
character, some intensification of loyalty and affection, to 
some greater existence, and not claiming in itself to be a 
unique differentiation of the real.' It is, no doubt, in the 
light of such phrases here as ' a separate member ', ' a unique 
differentiation ', that one must understand the pointed re- 
fusal made twice over, in the chapter on ' the destiny of the 
finite self ', to entertain the term ' member ' in reference to 
such selves. ' The finite self [he says there in the text], like 
everything else in the universe, is now and here beyond 
escape an element in the Absolute ' — to which we have the 
foot-note : ' I do not say " a member of " the Absolute. Such 
an expression might imply that it is, separately and with 
relative independence, a standing differentiation of the 
Absolute.' And again, a propos of the same point, we have 
another note, fourteen pages later, in which the same dis- 
tinction is punctiliously reasserted : ' We are sure, to begin 
with, of our eternal reality as an element — I do not say a 
member — in the Absolute.' And it is in harmony with the 

1 The chapter on ' The Theory of Judgment in relation to Absolutism \ 

2 Logic, 2nd ed., vol. ii, p. 259. 



xiv MEMBER OR ELEMENT? 271 

spirit of the distinction that the conclusion of the chapter 
offers us ' the eternal reality of the Absolute as that realiza- 
tion of our self which we instinctively demand and desire '. 1 

We are not at present discussing the specific problem of 
human immortality, although the argument may have im- 
portant bearings on such a question. What I wish to chal- 
lenge is Professor Bosanquet's whole view of the self or the 
finite individual — a view which is brought to a point in such 
a distinction as I have just quoted (between ' member ' and 
'element '), but which runs from end to end of his system 
and determines its whole structure. The too exclusive 
monism of the system depends, it seems to me, on a defective 
idea of what is meant by a self or by the fact of individua- 
tion in general. If one were inclined to put it strongly, one 
might almost say that Professor Bosanquet's theory does 
not contain the idea of self at all : the world is dissolved into 
a collection of qualities or adjectives which are ultimately 
housed in the Absolute. And again, just because of the 
failure to appreciate the meaning of finite selfhood, it is 
difficult to say whether even the Absolute is to be regarded 
as a self or not — that is to say, whether what is called the 
absolute experience possesses the centrality or focalized 
unity which is the essential characteristic of a self, and, in 
its degree, we may say, of everything that is real. 

The doctrine of the one perfect individual is, of course, 
the overt thesis of Professor Bosanquet's first Gifford 
volume on ' Individuality and Value ' ; but the founda- 
tions on which the argument rests are more clearly ex- 
posed in the chapter of the Logic to which I have already 
referred. It is there quite unequivocally stated, in con- 
nexion with the theory of the judgement, that the only 
ultimate subject of predication is ' the one true individual 

1 Value and Destiny, chap, ix, pp. 258, 272, 288. So again in the sum- 
mary of the same chapter (p. xxxi) the conclusion is suggested that 'it 
is rather a personality than our personality that is essential '. 



272 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

Real ', all finite individuals being ' in ultimate analysis 
connexions of content within the real individual to which 
they belong ', and of which they are therefore ' ultimately 
predicates V Here we come, I think, definitely to the part- 
ing of the ways, and yet, in reading Professor Bosanquet's 
chapter, one has the hopeless kind of feeling which so often 
oppresses us in philosophical controversy — a sense of despair 
at seeing the one party accumulating proofs, and reiterating 
assertions, of what it has never occurred to the other to deny. 
The question is whether finite individuals possess a substan- 
tive or an adjectival mode of being — whether, that is to say, 
they must be taken as substances in the Aristotelian sense of 
npoDTr) ovaia, that which cannot stand in a judgement as 
predicate or attribute of anything else, the individual thing 
or being, in short, of which we predicate the universals 
which constitute its nature. But what Professor Bosanquet 
elaborately contends is that the finite individual is not a 
substance in the Spinozistic sense, not ' wholly independent 
and self-subsistent ', not a ' true individual ', not, in short, 
the Absolute. And, of course, as Locke said in a similar 
connexion, ' it is but defining substance in that way and the 
business is done \ Taking substance in this sense, Professor 
Bosanquet naturally finds it ' quite astonishing that an 
appeal in favour of a doctrine of independent substances 
should be made on the ground of our experience of our- 
selves \ That experience seems to him, on the contrary, ' of 
all things the most fatal ' to such a doctrine. ' What all 
great masters of life have felt this [experience] to reveal has 
been a seeking on the part of the self for its own reality, 
which carries it into something beyond.' 2 But the misun- 
derstanding is almost wilful, for the appeal to which Pro- 
fessor Bosanquet is replying is not to the self as complete 
and self-explaining, but expressly to ' the unique individu- 
ality of the self as a centre of immediate experience \ Its 
1 Logic, vol. ii, pp. 258-9 (italics mine). 2 Ibid., pp. 254-5. 



xiv ARISTOTLE AND SPINOZA 273 

edges may be as ragged as you please ; our experience may, 
as it does, carry us on all sides beyond ourselves till we bring 
in the whole context of the universe. But, as Mr. Bradley 
himself testifies : ' My way of contact with Reality is through 
a limited aperture. For I cannot get at it directly except 
through the felt this. . . . Everything beyond, though not 
less real, is an expansion of the common essence which we 
feel burningly in this one focus. And so, in the end, to know 
the universe, we must fall back upon our personal experi- 
ence and sensation.' * Of course, as he proceeds to explain, 
this does not mean that we start with an Ego conscious of its 
own states ; it does not mean that we start with an idea of the 
Ego at all, for such a consciousness is admittedly a later 
growth of reflective interpretation. What it affirms is simply 
the fact on which developed selfhood is based — the fact that 
experience takes place in finite centres, and that all construc- 
tion, all knowledge, rests on the basis of what Mr. Bradley 
calls ' the this and the mine '. 2 Such presentation, he says, 
1 is the one source of our experience, and every element of 
the world must submit to pass through it. . . . The " this " 
is real for us in a sense in which nothing else is real.' 3 

If we now ask how it is that Mr. Bradley, in spite of his 
emphasis on the fact of individual subjects as separate * 
centres of immediate experience, proceeds nevertheless, in 
his favourite phrase, to ' merge ' these subjects, and to treat 
them as adjectives of the one Reality, which he makes the 

^Appearance and Reality, p. 260. 

2 Cf. Professor Stout, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1902-3, 
p. 19: 'The consciousness of self is a complex product of mental devel- 
opment, and even in its simplest phases it always includes a reference 
beyond immediate experience. All that we are justified in affirming is 
that the primary psychical reference implicit in all judgement is the 
ultimate point of departure of the growth of self-consciousness, and 
that it always continues to be its essential basis and presupposition.' 

3 Appearance and Reality, p. 225. 

4 ' They are considered, in some sense, to own an exclusive character. 
And that this character, in part, is exclusive cannot be denied' {ibid., 
p. 227). 



274 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

ultimate subject of all predication, the only intelligible 
answer seems to be that the assertion is intended as a denial 
of a final and unmediated pluralism, i. e. of the doctrine of 
ultimately self-subsistent, independent and unrelated reals. 
The best insight into a writer's meaning is often gained by 
considering what he is attacking or, to put it more precisely, 
his conception of the alternative to his own point of view. 
Now both Mr. Bradley and Professor Bosanquet appear to 
assume that such a pluralism is the only alternative to their 
own position. We have seen how this runs through Pro- 
fessor Bosanquet's statement. In almost identical terms, 
Mr. Bradley tells us that every finite fact is ' infected with 
relativity ' — it is ' given as existing by reference to some- 
thing else '. ' It is adjectival on what is beyond itself.' * 
But such a use of the word adjectival, though intelligible, 
and perhaps forcible, is none the less confessedly metaphori- 
cal. Things are not adjectives of one another. A shoe is 
not an attribute of a foot, and a son is not an attribute of his 
father, though in both cases the one fact transcends itself, 
and carries you to the other. Reduced to plain prose and 
ordinary English usage, the ' adjectival ' theory of the finite 
is simply the denial of unrelated reals; and, so understood, 
I at least should have no quarrel with it. If no finite fact 
can either exist or be understood by itself, then the true view 
of Reality must be that which conceives the universe as an 
inclusive system of interrelated facts which, as so included 
and interrelated, are to be regarded as constituent members 
of a single whole. This is the conception suggested by 
Professor Bosanquet's doctrine of the disjunctive judgement 
as the complete or perfect form to which the categorical and 
the hypothetical forms lead up. As readers of his Logic will 
recall, the disjunctive judgement, so interpreted, means not 
the bare ' either-or ' of formal logic, but the system of subor- 
dinate and mutually exclusive forms into which any given 
1 Principles of Logic, pp. 70-1. 






xiv ADJECTIVAL THEORY OF THE FINITE 275 

whole differentiates itself. And, in point of fact, we find 
him, in the course of the present discussion, repeatedly em- 
ploying such expressions as ' members of a system ', ' mem- 
bers within a whole ', ' membership within a concrete 
universal ', to cover the meaning formerly conveyed by the 
terms adjective and predicate, while still pertinaciously 
maintaining the formal point that such members are logically 
to be regarded as predicates of the whole. 1 

It might seem, therefore, as if it became merely a verbal 
question whether we are to. speak of an individual as a 
member or as a predicate of the Absolute. But unless there 
is some real distinction, how are we to account for Professor 
Bosanquet's punctilious and repeated rejection, in his 
Gifford volume, of the term ' members of the Absolute ' as 
applied to finite selves ? The rejection is, of course, verbally 
inconsistent with the phrases just quoted from the Logic, 
and one passage, at least, might be quoted from the Gifford 
volume itself 2 in which the term * membership ' occurs. 
But, even if not consistently adhered to, the fact of the 
deliberate rejection of the one term implies that, when taken 
in bitter earnest (to use a favourite phrase of his own), the 
idea of membership suggests another conception of the 
nature and function of individuation than that which domi- 
nates Mr. Bradley's and Professor Bosanquet's metaphysics. 
In the next lecture I shall try to indicate what I take the 
difference between the two conceptions to be. 

1 Cf. Logic, 2nd ed., vol. ii, p. 257. 

2 Value and Destiny, p. 204. There is a more important passage which 
I have since discovered, in which, speaking of ' the part ', he says : ' it is, 
in truth, more than a part, it is a member or an aspect'. This occurs 
(p. 298) in the fine concluding chapter of the same volume, ' The Gates 
of the Future ', and indicates at any rate a change of emphasis. 



LECTURE XV 

THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE INDIVIDUAL 

(Continued) 

I have dwelt at some length in the preceding lecture on 
Professor Bosanquet's tendency to rebel against what he 
called the ' formal distinctness ' of finite selves, and I 
cannot help finding a similar significance in the admission, so 
curiously recurrent in Mr. Bradley, of the ' inexplicability ' 
of the finite individual. ' That experience should take place 
in finite centres, and should wear the form of finite " this- 
ness ", is in the end inexplicable.' Again, ' Why there are 
finite appearances, and why appearances of such varied 
kinds, are questions not to be answered ; ' and, once more, 
in the closing pages, * We do not know why or how the 
Absolute divides itself into centres, or the way in which, so 
divided, it still remains one.' * And I quoted in the last 
lecture a passage from Professor Bosanquet in which he 
refers in the same spirit to the question ' why the finite 
world exists ', dismissing it with the remark that ' we can- 
not expect to give a reason for the scheme of the universe '. 
It would seem, then, as if the unity with which the system 
concludes tends to abolish the plurality of centres from 
which it starts. Their individual and, so far, separate 
existence cannot, of course, be denied as a fact of experi- 
ence ; but it is represented as ' appearance ' or illusion, due to 
the impotence of our finite point of view, and quite unreal 
' from the side of the Absolute '. ' It may be instructive ', 
says Mr. Bradley, ' to consider the question [of souls] from 
the side of the Absolute. We might be tempted to conclude 
that these souls are the Reality, or at least must be real. 
1 Appearance and Reality, pp. 226, 511, 527. 



xv APPEARANCE AND MERE APPEARANCE 277 

But that conclusion would be false, for the souls would fall 
within the realm of appearance and error. They would 
be, but, as such, they would not have reality. They would 
require a resolution and a recomposition, in which their 
individualities would be transmuted and absorbed. The 
plurality of souls in the Absolute is, therefore, appearance, 
and their existence is not genuine. . . . To gain consist- 
ency and truth it must be merged, and recomposed in a 
result in which its specialty must vanish.' x ' Taken together 
in the whole,' he says again in his final chapter, ' appear- 
ances, as such, cease.' 2 The equivocation here and else- 
where between appearance and mere appearance or illusion 
(the unconscious passage, I mean, from the one to the other) 
is, I venture to think, characteristic of Mr. Bradley's whole 
position; but, applied in this way to the existences which 
form the necessary starting-point of the whole speculation, 
it clearly involves a circle in the reasoning. There cannot 
be illusion or mere appearance, unless souls or finite selves 
really exist as such, to be the seats or victims of this illu- 
sion. The plurality of finite centres is, therefore, a true 
appearance; that is to say, the Absolute really does appear, 
or differentiate itself, in that way. 3 One might infer from 
Mr. Bradley's account that the Absolute had no cognizance, 
so to speak, of the existence of finite centres at all, in its 
' single and all-absorbing experience '. 4 What I wish to 
contend, on the contrary, is that the existence of such 
centres is a fact as true and important ' from the side of 
the Absolute ' as from the point of view of the finite beings 
themselves — nay, that this differentiation or creation (ac- 
cording as we name it) constitutes the very essence and 
open secret of the Absolute Life. 

This is apparently implied, as we saw at the outset, 

1 Ibid., pp. 304-6. 2 Ibid., p. 511. 

3 Cf. Professor Stout's argument, Proceedings of the Aristotelian 
Society, 1902-3, p. 28. 4 Appearance and Reality, p. 272. 



278 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

in Professor Bosanquet's emphatic description of the uni- 
verse as a place of soul-making. But on looking more 
closely at his language, a qualification may be noted, which 
at first is apt to pass unobserved. ' The universe ', he says, 
' is not a place of pleasure ... it is, from the highest point 
of view concerned with finite beings, a place of soul-making.' 
I confess that it was a long time before the insertion of the 
proviso which I have italicized struck me as a significant 
limitation of the general statement. But I observe that it is 
carefully repeated in the summary of Lecture III of the 
second course, where the moulding of souls is described as 
' the main work of the universe as finite '. One is forced to 
conclude, therefore, that the qualification is important in 
Professor Bosanquet's own eyes; and it is perhaps worth 
noting that in the second instance the phrase occurs after 
the mention of the passage from Keats. ' Keats's sugges- 
tion ', says Professor Bosanquet, ' is expressed so as to 
imply the pre-existence of something to be developed into 
souls, and a survival of souls in a further life after being 
moulded in this life. Accepting the conservation of all 
values in the absolute, I do not think these special assump- 
tions necessary. But the view that the moulding of souls is 
the main work of the universe as finite seems to contain an 
unquestionable truth.' This seems to imply that ultimately, 
or for the Absolute, the moulding of souls does not possess 
the central value or importance which is attributed to it 
from the finite point of view. Unless the souls are conserved 
as souls, it is hardly intelligible to speak of their moulding 
as in any sense the end or meaning of the world-process. 
But the whole drift of the two volumes is against the idea 
of individual survival; 'values' survive in the Absolute, 
but not persons. ' The destiny or conservation of particu- 
lar centres ', he tells us in his opening lecture, ' is not what 
primarily has value; what has value is the contribution 
which the particular centre — a representative of certain 



xv PROFESSOR ROYCE'S PARABLE 279 

elements in the whole — brings to the whole in which it is 
a member.' 

This idea of ' contribution ', as we have seen, runs 
through Professor Bosanquet's treatment, and it is an 
attractive idea, and true if rightly understood. But what 
if our contribution to the Absolute just lay in being our- 
self, our particular, imperfect, but developing, self, the 
unique individual whom it has taken such pains to fashion? 
The contribution cannot lie in any of the qualities of the 
individual taken separately, for these are all universals, 
and as such must be already fully represented in the perfect 
experience of the Absolute. The uselessness of such con- 
tributions from the side of the finite is aptly symbolized 
in the beautiful but strangely heartless parable with which 
Professor Royce closed his first exposition of the Absolute 
philosophy. ' At worst ', he says, ' we are like a child 
who has come to the palace of the King on the day of his 
wedding, bearing roses as a gift to grace the feast. For the 
child, waiting innocently to see whether the King will not 
appear and praise the welcome flowers, grows at last weary 
with watching all day and with listening to harsh words 
outside the palace gate, amid the jostling crowd. And so 
in the evening it falls fast asleep beneath the great dark 
walls, unseen and forgotten; and the withering roses by 
and by fall from its lap, and are scattered by the wind 
into the dusty highway, there to be trodden under foot and 
destroyed. Yet all that happens only because there are 
infinitely fairer treasures within the palace than the ignorant 
child could bring. The King knows of this, yes, and of ten 
thousand other proffered gifts of loyal subjects. But he 
needs them not. Rather are all things from eternity his 
own.' 1 Professor Royce has moved since then, and in his 
Gifford Lectures in this University 2 he has expounded a 

1 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 483. 
3 The World and the Individual. 



280 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

very different view of the place and destiny of the finite 
self in the Absolute life, and his later view is founded, 
I think I may say, just on the uniqueness of meaning or 
purpose in each individual life. To adopt the style of his 
own parable, it is not flowers, gifts out of the common 
stock of nature, which the child brings to the King, but 
the gift of himself, an offering which only he can make, 
and which, we would fain believe, is precious, as nothing- 
else can be, in the eyes of the King. 

But all the metaphors in which Mr. Bradley so abounds, 
expressive of the blending and merging of finite selves in the 
Absolute, depend on the assumption that the selves, as such, 
in their finite integrity, if one may so speak, possess no value 
for the Absolute. In the final chapter of Appearance and 
Reality, Mr. Bradley has occasion to consider a view which 
1 suggests ', he says, ' that in the Absolute finite centres are 
maintained and respected, and that we may consider them, 
as such, to persist and to be merely ordered and arranged '. 
' But not like this ', he proceeds, 1 ' is the final destiny and 
last truth of things. We have a re-arrangement not merely 
of things but of their internal elements. We have an all- 
pervasive transfusion with a re-blending of all material. 
And we can hardly say that the Absolute consists of finite 
things, when the things, as such, are there transmuted and 
have lost their individual natures.' Professor Bosanquet is 
not so copious in his metaphors or so peremptory in his way 
of putting the case; but his view of ' the final destiny and 
last truth of things \ as we have already partly seen, is, in all 
essentials, the same. He also tells us that the content of the 
imperfect individual has to be ' transmuted and re-arranged ', 2 
the result being ' the contribution of some modifying ele- 
ment to the experiences which come together in the Abso- 
lute '. 3 And, as Mr. Bradley talks of the finite self as being 

1 Appearance and Reality, p. 529. 2 Logic 2nd ed., vol. ii, p. 258. 

8 Value and Destiny, p. 259. 



xv MR. BRADLEY'S METAPHORS 281 

1 embraced and harmonized ' in the Absolute through its being 
1 suppressed as such ', so Professor Bosanquet speaks of 
1 the expansion and absorption of the self V With more 
audacious irony Mr. Bradley speaks of the perfection and 
harmony which the individual attains in the Absolute as 
' the complete gift and dissipation of his personality ' in 
which ' he, as such, must vanish \ ' The finite, as such, 
disappears in being accomplished.' 2 And again, ' the proc- 
ess of correction ' which finite existence undergoes in the 
Absolute may ' entirely dissipate its nature '. ' Transmuted ' 
is the word most favoured by both ; but synonyms plentifully 
scattered through Appearance and Reality are ' merged ', 
' blended ', ' fused ', ' absorbed ', ' run together ', ' trans- 
formed ', ' dissolved in a higher unity ', and even the more 
sinister terms ' suppressed ', ' destroyed ', and ' lost '. 

Mr. Bradley's famous metaphor of the window-frames 
as expressing the condition of finite selfhood significantly 
indicates his conception of the process and its final consum- 
mation. ' My incapacity to extend the boundary of my 
" this ", my inability to gain an immediate experience of 
that in which it is subordinated and reduced — is my mere 
imperfection. Because I cannot spread out my window until 
all is transparent, and all windows disappear, this does not 
justify me in insisting on my window-frame's rigidity. For 
that frame has, as such, no existence in reality, but only in 
our impotence. . . . There is no objection against the disap- 
pearance of limited transparencies in an all-embracing clear- 
ness.' 3 The Absolute is, in short, ' a whole in which all 
fmites blend and are resolved '. 4 And in Professor Bosan- 
quet's account, it seems to be through some such conception 
of the disappearance of the finite selves, as such, and the 
' re-distribution ' or ' re-adjustment ' 5 of their material in 

1 Ibid., p. 263. 2 Appearance and Reality, pp. 419-20. 

8 Ibid., pp. 253-4 (italics mine). * Ibid., p. 429. 

5 Value and Destiny, p. xxix. 



282 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

the perfect experience, that evil, which is said to be simply 
good in the wrong place, disappears, as such, in the Abso- 
lute. The contents or qualities of the different selves are, as 
it were, shaken up together, and neutralize and supplement 
one another. The metaphor is Professor Bosanquet's own. 
' How constantly we hear it said,' he writes, ' " They will do 
capital work together; A's failing will counteract B's," or 
" if A and B could be shaken up in a bag together, they 
would make a perfect man/' The Absolute is a limiting case 
of such a process.' x But if such an ' all-pervasive transfu- 
sion ' (to go back to Mr. Bradley's phrase) is the goal or, 
more strictly, the eternal reality which only our impotence 
disguises from us, then certainly we need not wonder that 
the existence of finite centres at all seems on the theory 
inexplicable and, one might even say, uncalled for. Why 
should the blessed harmony of the perfect experience be 
disturbed even in appearance ? 

But, in fact, the whole conception of blending and merg- 
ing, as applied to finite individuals, depends on the failure 
to recognize that every' real individual must possess a 
substantive existence in the Aristotelian sense. Both Mr. 
Bradley and Professor Bosanquet, as we saw in the preced- 
ing lecture, insist on taking the individual as an adjective, 
thereby reducing it to a conflux of universals or qualities. 
But it is a trite observation that no number of abstract 
universals flocking together can give you the concretely 
existing individual. To exist means to be the subject of 
qualities, to have or possess a nature. This is recognized 
in the current distinction between existence and content, 
between the ' that ' and the ' what '. And although, as we 
have already partly seen in another connexion, 2 this is a 
distinction which easily lends itself to erroneous statement, 
we must be on our guard against a counter-error. It is 
certain that the ' that ' of a thing, the substantive in it, is 

1 Value and Destiny, p. 217. 2 In Lecture IX. 



xv tki ioxlxz..- individual ai: 

not to be though: :: as a solid core of being, a grain, as it 
were, of reality-stuff, 1 to which, as a support, the qualities 
are attached. I: cannct be taker. :u: and exhibited as s:me- 
thing ever and above the qualities. But reaction from 
such errors easily leads to an exclusive stress on the content 
or nature as constituting and differentiating the individuals. 
Here again, it will be remembered, we have acknowledged 
the truth which lies in such a m : le :: statement Individu- 
als, it may be quite truly sa if. are ultimately lifferentiated by 
their nature, tha: is :: say. by their specific content, includ- 
ing therein, of course, the peculiar arrangement :: make-up 
:: :he ::r:er: — v.ha: -.ve rr.ay call its peculiar crgar.izacicn 
or system. But this way of stating the case is true only 
so long as it does not obscure the fact tha: we are iealing, in 
each case, with a concrete existent There is a subtle danger 
in the term content — a suggestion that the individual is 
simply a very complex group of universal s. But if. as e 
are agreed, the individual is not to be regarded as put 
together, so to speak, out of the abstract universal, in the 
shape of so many qualities, and the abstract particular in the 
shape of a pom: ::' existence, neither car. i: be regarded as 
simply an intricately mingled group of universais — a highly 
complex adjective. So to think of i: is to confound the 
abstractions of knowledge with the concrete texture : : 
realitv : i: is entirely to overlook the unitv and centralitv 
which is the characteristic of concre:e existence, and is what 
we mean by individuation. Such centralitv is acknowl- 
edged by our authors in the phrase ' finite centres '. But 
we have seen how 'precaricus ana superficial ' Professor 
Bosanquet pronounces such formal distinctness to be. And 
when the whole stress is laid on content, the content comes 
to be regarded as somehow detachable from the centres, and 
capable of being re-arranged and finally shaken up into 
perfect harmony in the Absolute. As Mr. Bradley puts i: : 
CI his Metaphysic, Book I, chap, iii, section 31. 



284 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

' We found no reason why such feelings, considered in any 
feature or aspect, should persist self-centred and aloof. It 
seemed possible, to say the least, that they all might blend 
with one another, and be merged in the experience of the one 
Reality. And with that possibility, given on all sides, we 
arrive at our conclusion. The " this " and " mine " are 
now absorbed as elements within our Absolute.' * 

But such a conception does no more justice to the sub- 
stantive unity of every existent than did the old associa- 
tionist dissolution of the self into atomic states or ideas, the 
doctrine which Mr. Bradley himself so mercilessly carica- 
tured in his Ethical Studies. ' Mr. Bain collects that the 
mind is a collection. Has he ever thought who collects Mr. 
Bain? ' So runs one of the notes that sticks in the memory. 
But now Mr. Bradley's own conception of the self seems 
open to the same retort. To use one of his own illustrations, 
the qualities or different elements of content in a centre seem 
as loose and independent as marbles in a bag, and when the 
string of the bag is loosened the marbles escape, as it were, 
into the empty space of the Absolute, to group themselves 
afresh. Or, seeing that the bag, as a receptacle, is ulti- 
mately a fiction, or an accommodation to popular thought, 
we ought rather to speak of temporarily cohering marbles 
detaching themselves from their groups and being swept into 
new combinations. But not so must we think of any self 
or soul or, indeed, of anything that actually exists, not even 
of the Absolute itself, if it is to be more than an abstraction, 
if it is really, as it is said to be, an experience. 

The term ' centres of experience ' involves, of course, 
a spatial metaphor, but, try as we may, we cannot get rid 
of such metaphors; and the term centre, or the essentially 
similar term focus, which Mr. Bradley, we have seen, occa- 
sionally uses as a variant, expresses, as happily as we can 
hope to do, the characteristic nature of the individual or 
appearance and Reality, p. 240. 



xv THE ORIGIN OF FINITE CENTRES 285 

the concrete universal as (formally at least) a self-contained 
world, in which a certain manifold of content acquires an 
internal unity as a single self or subject. The self or sub- 
ject, as we have already said, is not to be conceived as an 
entity over and above the content, or as a point of bare 
existence to which the content is, as it were, attached, or 
even as an eye placed in position over against its objects, to 
pass them in review. The unity of the subject, we may 
agree, simply expresses this peculiar organization or sys- 
tematization of the content. But it is not simply the unity 
which a systematic whole of content might possess as an 
object or for a spectator. Its content, in Professor Bosan- 
quet's phrase, has ' come alive ' ; it has become a unity for 
itself, a subject. This is, in very general terms, what we 
mean by a finite centre, a soul or, in its highest form, a self. 
The origin of such centres is, perhaps, the only fact to 
which we can fitly apply the term creation, for they neces- 
sarily import into the universe an element of relative inde- 
pendence and separateness which is not involved in the 
notion of externality as such. Externality, i. e. the general 
system of nature, cannot be really separated from the foci in 
which it finds expression; to make this separation, as we 
argued in the first course, is to hypostatize an abstraction. 
But if we try to imagine a purely mechanical system without 
any such living centres, it might seem possible to conceive it 
as simply the object of an absolute percipient. And the 
abstraction may help us to realize, by force of contrast, that 
a being which exists in any degree for itself, as a conscious 
subject, rounds itself thereby to an individual whole, and 
acquires in so doing an independence which we should not 
attribute to a mere object. To understand the process of 
such creation is necessarily beyond us ; we can barely describe 
its phases without involving ourselves in contradictions. In 
one aspect, the soul appears to be the product of the general 
system of things; in another aspect it appears to be self- 



286 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

created by its own action, to presuppose its own existence at 
every stage of its progress — so that it has been said para- 
doxically, there is no first moment of self-consciousness, 
but only a second. 

Professor Bosanquet, in his careful and suggestive chap- 
ters on ' The Moulding of Souls ', describes the origin of life 
as consisting essentially in the existence of ' a centre sensitive 
to a more concrete environment than that to which physical 
matter reacts ', and ' capable ', he adds, ' of maintaining, 
combining and transmitting adaptations, so as to build up 
a series of adapted creatures. In a word, what is needed is 
a centre of unification, differentiated by the externality 
which it unifies, nothing more in principle than this.' And 
by ' the sculpturing process of natural selection ' everything 
else is added, ' the content of life and mind [being] elicited 
by the bare principle of totality or non-contradiction ' from 
the environment or ' range of externality ' which constitutes 
the ' circumference ' of the living or intelligent centre. It is 
a process, as he rather strikingly puts it, of ' eliciting our 
own souls from their outsides V ' Elicit ', however, as he 
remarks himself, a little later, ' is a useful word, but covers 
an almost miraculous creation, which it does not explain.' 2 
For, of course, ' centre ' must be understood as an active 
centre of response, not simply as a focus in which a certain 
range of externality reflects itself into unity. Professor 
Bosanquet's quasi-metaphorical phrases sometimes seem to 
suggest the latter idea, and his remarks on the origin of life, 
taken together with the exclusive stress laid on the function 
of the environment, seem unduly to minimize the momentous 
difference between a responsive centre ' capable of main- 
taining, combining and transmitting its adaptations ', and the 
mass-points which serve the physicist as the substrata of the 
scheme of mechanical movements. The mass-point is a 
theoretical abstraction; the responsive centre is a practical 
1 Value and Destiny, pp. 74, 78-9. 2 Ibid., p. 97. 



ESSENTIAL MYSTERY OF THE FACT 287 



and living: realitv. In his first volume he lavs a similar stress 
en the physical z a s : s :: m. in: and tie intimate ::rrelati:n 
of the organism with its environment, bat he reminds us. 
in a phrase vhich I made use : an earlier lecture thai 
7 :ar. ntirr.ately mem :; sum assertions of the iecer.i- 
ence of mind on organic conditions is to conceive the soul 
:r self as ' a supervenient rertectim ' : ' a :e::e::::r erame : 
by the A:s:lu:e miirzkrv t: general 1ms u;:r certain 
iimrlex ::asi:rs ami arrangements : : externality '. In the 
::ns:i:us :eir~. he a its. ' the -his: lute ':egirs t: reveal its 
proper nature through and in union with a certain focus 
of externalities r Lotze. to whose phraseology Professor 
Bosanquet refers, while emphasizing the inevitable mystery 
involved in the process, brings out more clearly the peculiar 
nature of the product. * How it can be brought about," he 
ays, 'or how the creative power of the Absolute begins t: 
bring it about, that an existence is produced which, not only 
in accordance with universal laws produces and experiences 
effects and alterations in its connexion with others, but also, 
in its ideas, emotions and efforts, separates itself from the 
common foundation of all things, and becomes to a certain 
extent an independent centre — this uestion we shall r: 
m:re meruit t: answer than v.ve have : thers like it hur 
basmess is not to make tie : h but to understand the 
inner connexion of the world that is realized already; and 
it was this problem that forced us to lay down our limiting 
idea of the Absolute and its inner creation of countless finite 
beings. This idea we found it necessary to regard as the 
conception of an ultimate fact.' s 

Litre's statement is imrzrtam. :e:ause it is ;ust the 

partial independence of the finite centre the way in which it 

separates itself trim the ::mnt:n mtmiatim :t all thing's . 

: supra, p. 99. 

: .'■■ z-- ■::.: ;:\ z-.i '':'..-: :: :*■:-:; 

1 y.-::zc'>:\ ::: 5t::::r^_: Z:r : h :nr. ui:. : r. :; _"-:-- 



288 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

which constitutes the essential mystery of the fact. Monistic 
writers are too apt, after accepting the fact (as in some 
sense, of course, they must), to proceed to obliterate or ex- 
plain away its characteristic features. But if the individuals 
are simply pipes through which the Absolute pours itself, 
jets, as it were, of one fountain, there is no creation, no real 
differentiation, and, therefore, in a sense, no mystery. A 
self which is merely the channel or mouthpiece of another 
self is not a self. It is of the very nature of a self that it 
thinks and acts and views the world from its ozvn centre : 
each of us, as it has been said, dichotomizes the universe in 
a different place. No supposed result of speculative theory 
can override a certainty based on direct experience — the 
certainty, namely, that it is we who act and we who think. 
We are not simply an ideal (i. e. an imaginary) point 
through which the forces or ideas of the universe cross and 
pass. This primary conviction is not inspired by the ulterior 
motive of introducing pure contingency and overthrowing 
the idea of law and system. 1 No doubt it excludes a fatal- 
istic determinism a tergo, which is simply the denial of self- 
hood altogether; but it forces itself upon us apart from any 
outlook upon consequences. It is, in a sense, a direct cer- 
tainty, but it is based also on an insight into the contradictory 
nature of any counter-hypothesis. The creation of creators, 
says Professor Bosanquet dogmatically, is a mere self-contra- 
diction; and, no doubt, that would be so, if the term creator 
were understood in a literal and absolute sense. But the 
meaning which the epigrammatic phrase is intended to con- 
vey is just that the selves are real centres of existence and 
not points of intersection or radiating centres of a single 
force. As already said, there is no creation in the case, no 
otherness at all, unless the selves have some kind of inde- 
pendent status conferred upon them. And to say, as Pro- 
fessor Bosanquet does in the same breath with his accusation 
1 As Professor Bosanquet always seems to imagine. 



xv THE DIFFERENCE MUST BE REAL 289 

of self-contradiction, that ' there cannot be genuine freedom 
unless the divine will is genuinely one with that of finite 
beings in a single personality ' , is, to my mind (unless we are 
speaking of the ethical and spiritual harmony of the two 
wills), to furnish a much more glaring instance of a self- 
contradiction, for it is to deny that there are two wills at all. 
Professor Bosanquet is fond of appealing to the great 
experiences of life — to love, to the religious consciousness, 
to social union — as carrying us out of the quasi-legal world 
of selfish claims and individualistic justice into a world of 
deeper spiritual membership, where such claims disappear in 
the intimate consciousness of union with our fellows, with 
the beloved object, or with God. And again this is true, 
beyond question, of all private and exclusive or, as we say, 
purely selfish desires and claims. But I appeal confidently 
to the same great experiences to prove the absolute necessity 
of what I will call ' otherness ', if they are to exist at all. 
It takes two not only to make a bargain; it takes two to 
love and to be loved, two to worship and to be worshipped, 
and many combined in a common purpose to form a society 
or a people. Surely, as the poet says, sweet love were slain, 
could difference be abolished; the most self-effacing love but 
ministers to the intensity of a double fruition. As in the love 
of man and woman, so in a great friendship the completest 
identification of interests and aims does not merge the 
friends in one ; the most perfect alter ego must remain an 
alter if the experience is to exist, if the joy of an intensified 
life is to be tasted at all. Selfhood is not selfishness. And, 
passing to the instance of society, it is an insidious fallacy to 
speak as if, with the growth of social solidarity, there was 
formed ' an individuality ' in which particular centres ' tend 
to be, as particular centres, transcended and absorbed V 
Surely the better the society — the more pervasive the spirit 
of membership — the more fully does each member realize 

1 Value and Destiny, p. 92. 



2Q0 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

and enjoy his own individuality. It is an individual foci 
that the common life burns : it is reflected to us from the 
countenances of our fellows. 

And when we come finally to the religious consciousness 
the same necessity holds. I will take Professor Bosanquet's 
own account of that experience, to which both he and Mr. 
Bradley assign — and rightly assign — such central signifi- 
cance. The religious consciousness is expressly defined by 
Professor Bosanquet as self-recognition, 1 the recognition 
by the finite of its ' true being ' and of its ' union with the 
whole'; the insight into 'the impossibility of its finding 
peace otherwise than as offering itself to .the whole \ Or, 
again, ' the primary principle of religion ' is said to be found 
' in devotion and worship, such that in them the self not 
merely, as in all action, passes beyond itself, but consciously 
and intentionally rejects itself as worthless, because of the 
supreme value which it attaches to the object with which 
it desires and affirms its union \ 2 Similarly, in the conclud- 
ing chapter, the experience is described as ' self-identification 
with perfection '; ' accepting perfection as real while admit- 
ting that he cannot attain it in his own right ' ; ' his identifi- 
cation by faith with the greatness of the universe \ 3 The 
description is, I think, beyond challenge, but every phrase 
of it surely implies that reality of difference for which the 
system, in its letter at least, appears to leave no room. If 
the specific religious insight is the recognition of dependence, 
it is only inasmuch as we have a certain independent status 
that we can recognize and affirm the dependence. When 
the religious man identifies himself with the perfection 
of the whole, and, as it were, appropriates it to himself, 
the very act of self-identification implies the individual 
difference of the self that makes it. Otherwise the whole 



1 ' Self-recognition, as we shall see, is another phrase for the religious 
consciousness ' (Value mid Destiny, p. 18; cf. p. 20). ~ Ibid., p. 26, 

8 Ibid., p. 303. Cf. the Summary, p. xxxii. 



xv PERSONALITY AS A FORMED WILL 291 

thing is a puppet show, and we fall back on the vulgar pan- 
theism which makes the Absolute the direct agent in every- 
thing that is done : 

And patiently exact, 

This universal God 

Alike to any act 

Proceeds at any nod, 
And quietly declaims the cursings of himself. 1 

The religious attitude — all that we mean by worship, adora- 
tion, self-surrender — is wholly impossible, if the selves are 
conceived as telephone wires along which the Absolute acts 
or thinks. As it has often been remarked, the system of 
Spinoza has no room in it for Spinoza himself and ' the 
intellectual love of God ' with which he closes his Ethics. 
That sublime acquiescence, that ardour of self-identification 
with the spirit of the universe, is possible only to beings who 
are more than mere modes of a divine Substance — whose 
prerogative it rather is to become the sons of God. 

The relation of the Absolute to finite individuals cannot, 
in fact, be properly stated in terms of the old metaphysic of 
substance. The essential feature of the Christian conception 
of the world, in contrast to the Hellenic, may be said to be 
that it regards the person and the relations of persons to one 
another as the essence of reality, whereas Greek thought 
conceived of personality, however spiritual, as a restrictive 
characteristic of the finite — a transitory product of a life 
which as a whole is impersonal. 2 Modern Absolutism seems, 
in this respect, to revert to the pre-Christian mode of con- 
ception, and to repeat also the too exclusively intellectualistic 
attitude, which characterizes Greek thought in the main. 
But no solution of the problem of God and man can be 
reached from a consideration of man as a merely cognitive 

1 Empedoclcs on Etna. 

a Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, vol. i, p. 77, ' the profound personal- 
ism of Christianity '. Cf. Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 238 
(English translation). 



• 



292 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

being. Bare will is certainly an abstraction ; but so is knowl- 
edge, if it is not regarded as the moving and determining 
force in a personality, shaping its attitude to the world and 
all the action which is the outcome of that attitude. In this 
sense it is the character, or spiritual will, that is the concrete 
personality. It is as such a will that man is independent. To 
be a self is to be a formed will, originating its own actions 
and accepting ultimate responsibility for them. For in all 
questions of moral causation the person is necessarily, in our 
explanations, a terminus ad quern or a terminus a quo. He 
is the source of the action : we cannot go behind him and 
treat him as a thoroughfare through which certain forces 
operate and contrive to produce a particular result. The 
person is certainly not a fixed and unchangeable unit. He 
is open to moral education and spiritual regeneration : he 
may change so much as to become, in the expressive phrase 
of religion, a new creature. But although he is thus open 
to all the influences of the universe, these do not act on him 
like forces ab extra. They make their appeal to him, but 
he must give the response. He cannot be driven, he must 
be drawn. And, therefore, the process of transformation is 
always, in a very real aspect of it, his own act, his deliberate 
choice. We may believe in the ultimately constraining 
power of the Good, 1 but a moral being cannot be comman- 
deered ; he must be persuaded, and the process may be long. 
* Behold, I stand at the door and knock : if any man hear my 
voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with 
him, and he with me.' Even the divine importunity will not 
force an entrance. This freedom belongs to a self-conscious 
being as such, and it is the fundamental condition of the 
ethical life; without it we should have a world of automata. 

1 Cf . Emerson's lines, ' The Park ' : 

Yet spake yon purple mountain, 

Yet said yon ancient wood, 
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime 

Leads all souls to the Good. * 



xv THE FACT OF FREEDOM 293 

No doubt the creation of beings who are really selves, with 
this measure of ' apartness ' and independent action, is the 
' main miracle ' l of the universe. It is, in the very nature 
of the case, impossible that we should understand the relation 
(if one may even use such a finite term as relation) between 
a creative Spirit and its creatures, whether as regards the 
independence conferred or the mode in which the life-history 
of the finite being still remains part of the infinite experience. 
Finite beings know one another from the- outside, as it were, 
the knower being ipso facto excluded from the immediate 
experience of any other centre. But there can be no such 
barrier, we may suppose, between the finite consciousness 
and the Being in which- its existence is rooted. It must 
remain open and accessible — it must enter into the divine 
experience in a way for which our mode of knowing hardly 
furnishes us with an analogy. It is, I say, in the nature of 
the case, impossible that we should understand, and be able 
to construct for ourselves, the relation in question; for to 
do so would be to transcend the conditions of our own 
individuality, to get, as it were, behind the conditions of 
finite existence and actually repeat the process of creation 
and realize the absolute experience. Accordingly, when we 
do try to schematize the fact for ourselves, we either elimi- 
nate the characteristics of selfhood by making the individual 
simply a vehicle of transmission or, on the other hand, we 
lose hold of the creative unity altogether by treating the 
individuals as independent, self-subsistent units. But be- 
cause such is the inevitable fate of any attempt to describe 
the fact in terms devised to express the relation of one finite 
fact to another, and only there appropriate, it by no means 
follows that such creation is impossible for the Absolute. 
And certainly no theoretic difficulties in conceiving how we 

1 This main-miracle, that thou art thou, 
With power on thine own act and on the world. 

Tennyson, ' De Profundis '. 



294 ABSOLUTISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL lect. 

can be free should prevent us from recognizing that we are 
free. In asserting freedom we are not asserting anything 
additional and extraneous about our experience; we are 
simply describing its nature, as we know it from within. 
And we are applying, in this supreme instance, the principle 
which has guided us throughout, the principle of the reality 
of appearances. 

So far as we are concerned, individuation, in the sense 
explained, appears to represent the fundamental method of 
creation, or, to put it otherwise, the fundamental structure 
of the actual world. And when we turn to the Absolute and 
try to figure to ourselves ' the art of world-making ' : from 
that standpoint, the same suggestion seems strongly empha- 
sized. ' We are finite,' says Professor Bosanquet in a fine 
passage of his introductory lecture, ' we are finite, which 
means incomplete, and not fitted to be absolute ends. . . . 
We must have something greater than our finite selves 
to contemplate. We want something above us, something 
to make us dare and do and hope to be.' 2 ' The unit \ he 
says in another place, ' looks from itself and not to itself 
and asks nothing better than to be lost in the whole.' 3 
Nothing could be truer. It is the familiar paradox of the 
ethical and religious life, dying to live, self-realization 
through self-sacrifice, self-development through absorption 
in objective interests and in the currents of the universal 
life. The individual who would find his end in the culture 
of his own personality, whether as a moral work of art or in 
the wider fields of literature and taste, suffers the same 
defeat as the voluptuary who pursues pleasure for pleasure's 
sake. He goes in danger of the doom figured by Tennyson 
in ' The Palace of Art '. But although the individual may 
not make himself his own End, the world of finite indi- 
viduals may well constitute the End of the Absolute. How 

1 As Hume calls it. 2 Individuality and Value, p. 25. 

3 Value and Destiny, p. 153. 



xv ' FROM THE SIDE OF THE ABSOLUTE ' 295 

can we ascribe to the Absolute, as many theologians have 
done, the self-centred life, the contemplation of His own 
glory, which spells moral death in the creature? Is it rea- 
sonable to deny of the fontal life of God that giving of 
Himself and finding of Himself in others, which we recog- 
nize as the perfection and fruition of the human life? This 
would be, under pretext of exalting the divine, to place it 
lower than the best we know. More reasonable is it to sup- 
pose that the infinite reality reflects itself in the finite 
nature, and that, in the conditions of mortal perfection, 

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither — 

repeating in the process of their own experience the flux and 
reflux of the cosmic life. 

The idea of end or purpose may not be literally applicable 
in such a sphere, but we may at least say that just ' from the 
side of the Absolute ' the meaning of the finite process must 
lie in the creation of a world of individual spirits; for to 
such alone can He reveal himself, and from them receive the 
answering tribute of love and adoration. The coming into 
being of such internalities means ' eliciting ', in Professor 
Bosanquet's phrase, out of the common fund of externality 
a new world of appreciation, of mutual recognition and 
spiritual communion, to which the former now assumes 
a merely instrumental function, a circuit made by the Abso- 
lute towards the formation of beings capable of spiritual 
response, which enrich thereby the life from which they 
spring. Only for and in such beings does the Absolute take 
on the lineaments of God. This world of self-conscious 
personalities is the Civitas Dei, described by St. Augustine 
and by Leibnitz; it is the Kingdom of the Spirit of which 
theologians speak as the great consummation. The yearning 
of the divine for fellowship is the idea of the well-known 



_/ ABSOLUTISM AND THE ErEE.EEEEEE lzct. 

lines of Schiller v ith nich Hegel doses his Phem .etiology : 

Friendless as the mighty Lord :: worlds, 

Felt fefeet — thereftre treated spirits 
Blessed mirrtrs to his hlessedotess . . . 
From the thalice :: the world :f souls 
Foams for him n . itttfooitt: de 

But if we project oar imagination thus intc the vacancy 
before the world was nay before k I was truly jiod we 
must remember that we are mereh translating into terms :i 
time, as in a Platonic myth, the eternal fa: : the divine 
nature, as a self-communicating life The livine Eremite. 
pre-existent Creator, is a figure if ::te may s: steak :f 
the logical imagination: it indicates what jod is not. it does 
not tell us what He _:::e was. 



::;te on professor bosanquets use of the 
s : hal analogy 

Prttes ; :r Bosanquet himself on more that toe tttasion, 
suggests that io the tooteetitr: ef society we have the best 
analogy t: the absolute experience. St fa: as there is formed 
a social mind', he says, the particular centres begin to be 
adapted as members t: an inch trans tending their 

. . Eheir qualities begin to be reinforced by other c 
their ieficiendes .plied, in a word, their immanent contra- 
dictions rent: - ljustment and supplementa: ::. sc that 
the body ;f particularised zentres begins tc take to a hstinct 
resemblance tc we know must be the character of the 
absolute.* * So, attain, he speaks of 'the social whole and 
civilisation' as a realised anticipation of the absolute - 
'Ultimate reality i ; for "the metaehys: uroteot' . he says. 
'what the social collectivity is for toe s::iai student/ 3 But 
there is the same wavering of point of vie hich we have 
noted throughout, lue to the defective sense uf personality. It 
is the supra-individual and. as it were, impersonal tharacter of 
the s: tialmind or the social collects o that seems to commend 

: ~'z.-.:-: ::z r.;:: _ ; :o ' Ibii : :__ * Ibid., p. II. 



xv THE SOCIAL ANALOGY 297 

it to Professor Bosanquet as an analogy. He speaks, in the 
context of the passage first quoted, of the tendency of the so- 
cial process as being ' towards an individuality in which cen- 
tres, formed and further formed by such a process, tend to be, 
as particular centres, transcended and absorbed'. And, on the 
other hand, inasmuch as the social collectivity has no self-con- 
sciousness, no centralized existence of its own, apart from the 
particular centres in which it is realized, the suggestion of the 
analogy, when thus applied, is that the Absolute also is not to 
be regarded as a self-centred life. In that way the personality 
both of the finite centres and of the Absolute tends to dis- 
appear. But, as we have seen, the development of society, so 
far from ' absorbing ' its individual members, is a continual 
development of their self-consciousness, and furnishes no 
grounds, therefore, for inferring their disappearance, as par- 
ticular centres, in the Absolute. And if we take the idea of 
centrality or individuation ' in bitter earnest ' as the character- 
istic of everything that is concretely real, we shall not speak or 
think of the Absolute as ' a vast continuum ' of which ' finite 
self-conscious creatures' are ' fragments '* but rather as the 
focal unity of a world of self-conscious worlds, to which it is 
not only their sustaining substance but also the illumination of 
their lives. Society, taken by itself, is an abstraction hyposta- 
tized, but the idea of a divine Socins has been one of the most 
abiding inspirations of religious experience. 2 

1 ' We approach the study of finite self-conscious creatures, prepared 
to find in them the fragments of a vast continuum ' {Value and Destiny, 
p. 11). Cf. p. 12, 'the continuum of the whole'. 

2 See Supplementary Note D on Lectures XIV and XV, p. 426- 



LECTURE XVI 
THE IDEA OF CREATION 

At the close of the last lecture we found ourselves insen- 
sibly involved in criticism of a certain conception of Crea- 
tion. The word Creation recurs so constantly in philosophi- 
cal and theological discussions of the relation of God to the 
world that it is desirable to submit the idea to a somewhat 
more careful examination, in order to discover the meaning, 
or meanings, which have been attached to the conception. 
This should enable us to determine whether, in any of its 
senses, it is to be taken as expressing or pointing to a philo- 
sophical truth. 

The idea forms a natural part of any theory which treats 
God deistically as a purely transcendent Being — a Cause or 
Author of the universe, entirely distinct from an effect 
which is spoken of metaphorically as ' the work of his 
hands '. But it occurs also in theories which claim to be 
immanental, and in some of its forms it may not be incom- 
patible with such a doctrine. Historically, the idea carries 
us back to a primitive stage of pictorial thought like that 
of the Zulus, mentioned by Tylor, who trace their ancestry 
back to Unkulunkulu, the Old-old-one, who created the 
world. It meets us with something of a sublime simplicity 
in the opening words of Genesis — ' In the beginning God 
created the heaven and the earth.' Such a statement yields 
a temporary satisfaction to the craving for causal explana- 
tion, though it is not necessary to go beyond the child's 
question, ' Who made God ? ', to become aware of its meta- 
physical insufficiency. As it has been not unjustly said, 1 

1 Von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, iii. 196 (English 
translation). 



xvi AN EVENT IN THE PAST 299 

' Contentment with the regress to a God-creator or some 
similar notion is the true mark of speculative indolence/ 

The first feature in the ordinary idea of creation to which 
I wish to draw attention is that creation is regarded as an 
event which took place at a definite date in the past, to 
which we can remount by a temporal and causal regress. 
The old chroniclers in their naive fashion record the event 
methodically with the other entries that seemed to call for 
notice, such as the death of a monarch, an invasion of the 
enemy, a plague, or an exceptionally bad winter. We know 
that the date was long fixed by Biblical chronology as the 
year 4004 b. c. And so it remained till the rise of geological 
science brought about a vast extension of cosmic time. 
Theology accommodated itself, not without some friction,' 
to the demands of the new science ; but, although the actual 
date was thrust back, the view of creation as an event 
that happened at some definite period in the past still con- 
tinued to be held by ordinary theological thought. Perhaps 
I should say still continues to be held, for I find so able a 
theologian as the late Professor Flint telling us, in his 
lectures on Theism, that ' the question in the theistic argu- 
ment from causality ' is ' to prove the universe to have been 
an event — to have had a commencement. . . . Compared 
therewith, all other questions which have been introduced 
into, or associated with, the argument are of very subordi- 
nate importance.' l And accordingly, in order to answer 
the question, he proceeds to an examination of the universe 
' in order to determine whether or not it bears the marks 
of being an event '. And because such an examination 
reveals mutability stamped upon every particular fact in 
the universe, even its apparently most stable formations — so 
that each may be treated as an event dependent on a pre- 
ceding event, a phase in a universal process of transforma- 
tion — we have the extraordinary conclusion drawn that 

1 Theism, 8th ed., p. 101. 



300 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

the universe as a whole is an event or effect in the same 
sense. But surely such an argument is an example in excelsis 
of the fallacy of- Composition. A little later the author is 
found grasping at Lord Kelvin's then current deductions 
from the theory of heat. ' If this theory be true,' he says, 
' physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the 
notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly 
teaches that creation took place, that the present system of 
nature and its laws originated at an approximately assign- 
able date in the past.' x But Sir William Thomson's specu- 
lation, based on the ultimate dissipation or, rather, degra- 
dation of energy — an end or running-down of the cosmic 
mechanism, implying a beginning or start of the same 
within a measurable time — entirely depended on the concep- 
tion of the universe as a finite closed system, and therefore 
begged the whole question. It has ceased to agitate the 
scientific world, as the conditions of scientific theorizing 
have come to be more clearly realized; and the recent 
discovery of the immense quantities of energy generated 
through the disintegration of radium, by completely upset- 
ting the basis of the calculation, has made men more than 
ever disinclined to draw definite and final conclusions from 
theories which are in a process of continual revision. In 
this connexion it is a significant fact, on which I cannot 
help remarking, that, although the whole face of physical 
science has been changed by the remarkable discoveries 
of the last twenty years, there has been no attempt to 
exploit the changes either in a theological or an anti- 
theological interest. 

It is difficult to understand the importance attached by 
many theologians to a temporal origin of the physical uni- 
verse, if we have once abandoned the geocentric hypoth- 
esis and its corollaries. The spectacle of the birth and 
death of worlds may actually be seen by the astronomer as 
1 Theism, p. 117. 



xvi A •• FIRST ' CAUSE 301 

he scans the heavens, and in that sense the earth and the 
solar system to which it belongs undoubtedly had a beginning 
and may be expected to have an end. These, however, are 
but local incidents of the distribution of the cosmic forces; 
what passes away here is being born, or is ripening to 
fruition, elsewhere. The universe, as it has been said, 1 has 
no seasons, but all at once bears its leaves, fruit, and 
blossom. In Professor Flint's case, the stress laid on 
origin ' at some assignable date in the past ' is the less 
easy to understand, because in the next section of the same 
lecture he proceeds to argue that secondary, that is to say, 
physical, causes are not, strictly speaking, causes at all : 
each merely transmits to its consequent what it has received 
from its antecedent. ' A true cause is one to which the 
reason not only moves but in which it rests, and except in 
a first cause the mind cannot rest.' And this is described 
as ' a single all-originating, all-pervading, all-sustaining 

principle \11 things must consequently " live, move 

and have their being " therein. It is at their end as well 
as at their origin; it encompasses them, all round: it 
penetrates them, all through. The least things are not 
merely linked on to it through intermediate agencies which 
go back an enormous distance, but are immediately present 
to it, and filled to the limit of their faculties with its power.' 2 
Obviously we have passed here to a different range of ideas 
altogether, 3 to a frankly immanental view of causation 
where ' first ', in the expression ' first cause ', has no refer- 
ence to antecedence in time, but is employed propter excel- 
lentiam, as the Scholastics say, to signify that what is so 
designated is the true and only cause. As Kant no less than 
Spinoza clearly saw, God cannot be reached at the farther 



1 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 500. 

2 Theism, pp. 124, 127. 

3 This is noted by Adamson in his Shaw Lectures On the Philosophy 
of Kant, p. 224. 



302 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

end of any chain of phenomenal antecedents and conse- 
quents. To imagine that He could be reached in that way is 
to treat God and the divine action as a particular fact, one 
more phenomenon added to the series. But to talk of a 
' first ' cause in that sense is a contradiction in terms ; once 
embarked on the modal sequence we are launched upon the 
infinite regress. God is cause only in the sense of ground, 
that is to say, the Being whose nature is expressed in the 
system as a whole. 1 In other words, God is cause only 
when causa = ratio ; for the reason or ultimate explanation 
of anything is only to be found in the whole nature of the 
system in which it is included. 

The idea contained in Professor Flint's second account, 
that the existence of the universe depends upon a con- 
tinuous forth-putting of divine power was recognized by 
mediaeval thinkers in the doctrine, which Descartes takes 
over from them, that ' the conservation of a substance in 
each moment of its duration requires the same power and 
act that would be necessary to create it, supposing it were 
not yet in existence \ 2 This they held, even while main- 
taining at the same time the theory of the original creation 
of the universe at a definite period in the past. But the 
more thoughtfully we consider the idea of creation as a 
special act or event that took place once upon a time, the 
more inapplicable does it appear. It represents the universe 
as in no way organic to the divine life. On the contrary, 
God is conceived as a pre-existent, self-centred Person to 
whom, in his untroubled eternity, the idea of such a creation 
occurs, one might almost say, as an afterthought. The 
inspiration is forthwith put into execution; the world is 

1 God, in Spinoza's terminology, is not (except in a very technical 
sense which he explains) the causa remota of anything, but He is the 
causa immanens of all things, inasmuch as ' all things which come to 
pass, come to pass solely through the law of the infinite nature of God, 
and follow from his essence' {Ethics, i. 15, Scholium). 

2 Meditations, iii. 



xvi A DIVINE MAGICIAN 303 

created ' by the word of his power '. A universe is sum- 
moned into existence and stands somehow there, as shapes 
and figures might appear at a sorcerer's word of command, 
or as temples and towers rise like an exhalation before the 
eyes of a dreamer. The act is an incident in God's exist- 
ence, and the product stands somehow independently outside 
him and goes by itself ; so that his relation to the subsequent 
unfolding of the cosmic drama is at most that of an inter- 
ested spectator. 

It is somehow thus, I think, that popular thought envis- 
ages the relation of God to the universe in creation, though 
it, no doubt, naively attributes a much greater importance 
to the incident and its consequences than they could reason- 
ably be supposed to have for such an eternally self-involved 
Deity. But such a conception of creation belongs to the 
same circle of ideas as the waving of a magician's wand. It 
has no place either in serious thinking or in genuine religion. 
It was an old gibe of the Epicureans, familiar in Cicero's 
day, to ask what God did before He created the heavens and 
the earth, and how He came to choose just then to create 
them, after forbearing to do so for so many ages — a flip- 
pancy, no doubt, but a flippancy provoked in some measure 
by the shallow anthropomorphism of the doctrine assailed. 
St. Augustine, who twice addresses himself to meet the 
criticism, wins a technical victory by the argument that 
time itself was created along with the world of moving 
things by which its duration is measured, so that there 
could be no lapse of unoccupied time before the creation, 
there being in eternity neither before nor after. 1 But, in 
so far as he still regards creation as a unique event, an 
event, that is, which took place once — an act of God's will, 
but not grounded in his nature — he does not meet the real 
difficulty. The world, on his theory, still had an absolute 

1 Cum tempore, non in tempore is Augustine's distinction ; the world 
was not created in time but together with time. So Plato in the 
Timaeus, 38, ' Time, then, was created with the heaven.' 



304 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

origin; and, even if it had never existed at all, the self- 
existent being of God would have been in no way affected. 
And this external and almost accidental relation between 
the two is inevitably implied in phrases which speak of 
a divine existence ' before the world was \ But this solitary, 
ante-mundane Figure is the residuum of a primitive and 
pictorial fashion of thinking, a magnified man, but rarefied 
to bare mind, after the analogy of Aristotle's pure thinking 
upon thought, and left standing apart from the world he 
is invoked to explain. A God so conceived is an Absolute 
in the old bad sense of a being existing by itself with no 
essential relations to anything else. But if God is the prin- 
ciple through which the world becomes intelligible, His 
relation to the world cannot be of the merely incidental 
character indicated. If the universe is to be understood 
through God, the nature of God must no less be expressed 
in the universe and understood through it. 

Hence more speculative minds, both before and after 
Augustine, thinkers both Christian and non-Christian, have 
insisted that creation must be regarded as an eternal act, 
an act grounded in the divine nature and, therefore, if we 
are to use the language of time, coeval with the divine 
existence. Such was the doctrine of Origen, the early 
Father. God, says Spinoza, is the cause of all things, per se, 
not per accidens. God is not more necessary to the world, 
says Hegel, than the world to God. Without the world, 
God were not God. ' God is the creator of the world,' he 
says, repeating Spinoza's thought, ' it belongs to his being, 
to his essence to be Creator. . . . That he is Creator is more- 
over not an act undertaken once for all; what is in the 
Idea is an eternal element or determination of the Idea 
itself.' x And lest these latter testimonies should be in any 
way suspect, I will quote to the same effect from Ulrici, 

1 Werke, vol. xii, p. 181 (in the second volume of the Philosophy of 
Religion), 



xvi CREATION AS AN ETERNAL ACT 305 

prominent half a century ago as a defender of Theism 
against all that he deemed pantheistic error. * The creation 
of the world ', says Ulrici, ' is certainly to be understood as 
the free act of God. But his freedom is nowise an arbi- 
trary freedom (Willkiihr) which at its mere good pleasure 
might act so or otherwise, might act or refrain from act- 
ing. ... In truth God is not first God and then creator of 
the world, but as God he is creator of the world, and only as 
creator of the world is he God. To separate the two ideas 
from one another is an empty and arbitrary abstraction, 
affirming in God an unmeaning difference which contradicts 
the unity of the divine nature.' ' Hence,' he concludes, ' just 
as God does not become creator of the world but is from 
eternity creator of the world, so the world too, though not 
eternal of itself, exists from eternity as the creation (or act) 
of God.' » 

But if the world is thus co-eternal with God, how does 
the doctrine differ, it may be asked, from the Greek doctrine 
of the eternity of matter, in opposition to which the Chris- 
tian dogma of l creation out of nothing ' was primarily 
formulated ? The difference is indicated in the last phrases 
quoted from Ulrici : it is eternal not of itself, but as the 
eternal creation of God. The doctrine of matter in the 
Platonic and Aristotelian theories is a somewhat obscure 
question. To Plato, who hardly uses the actual term at 
all, matter was the element of Non-Being, with which the 
pure Being of the Ideas is mingled so as to produce the 
phenomenal world of sense-experience; and he is commonly 
understood to be thinking chiefly of space (the unlimited, 
the great and small, as he calls it) considered as a principle 
of individuation and multiplication. To Aristotle, from 
whose philosophy the opposition of matter and form is 
derived, matter is the idea of mere potentiality not yet 
actual — an idea which appears to be involved in any process 
1 Gott und Welt, pp. 531-2. 



3 o6 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

of development. Neither, therefore, understood by the term 
what it means in our ordinary usage and in modern philos- 
ophy generally — the elemental structure of the physical 
world. Both, however, regarded it as a limitation of the 
purposive action of the ideal or formal principle. It is 
the dvaynr}, or mechanical necessity, which imports into the 
world of experience an element of contingency or casualty, 
and prevents it from being a perfect realization or embodi- 
ment of reason. Thus in Aristotle, as well as in Plato, the 
cosmic process is regarded ' ultimately under the analogy 
of the plastic artist who finds in the hard material a limit 
to the realization of his formative thought V Careful 
examination might show that Plato and Aristotle in such 
expressions do little more than formulate the conditions 
which appear to be involved in the existence of an indi- 
viduated or differentiated universe at all, conditions which 
modern philosophy also is forced, in one fashion or another, 
to recognize. But looked at roughly — and especially if 
we read into the doctrine of matter the ordinary associations 
of the word, and think, as the Christian writers mainly did, 
of the world-artificer in the Timaeus — ancient thought 
appears to leave us with a dualism of two independent and 
co-eternal principles, the one of which is conceived as 
hampering and limiting the divine activity. 

It was against this dualistic conception that the Christian 
doctrine of creation out of nothing was directed. All the 
dogmas of the creed, it has often been pointed out, were 
formulated as counter-statements directed against some 
error or heresy ; and hence it is from what they deny, rather 
than from what they affirm, that their true meaning or inten- 
tion is to be gathered. The doctrine of creation out of 
nothing is accordingly the denial that the world was merely 
shaped by God out of a pre-existing material. God is cre- 
ator, not artificer; in him is to be found the sole explana- 

1 Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 144 (English translation). 



xvi CREATION ' OUT OF NOTHING ' 307 

tion of the existence of the world, as well as of its detailed 
arrangements. There are not two principles, but one. 
Creation, moreover, was expressly defined as an act of will, 
in opposition to the many then current theories of emanation 
and evolution, in which the derivation of the world from 
its ultimate principle is conceived, by the aid of plentiful, 
and often gross, physical analogies, as a process undergone, 
so to speak, by the ground of things without its intelligent 
concurrence, much like the fission, for example, by which 
the lowest organisms propagate themselves. The impor- 
tance of the doctrine, negatively, in these two directions, 
and its greater relative truth may therefore be freely 
acknowledged. But the precise positive meaning to be at- 
tached to the formula was necessarily a subject for further 
philosophical analysis. 

Creation was, doubtless, originally conceived by early 
Christian thinkers in the quasi-magical fashion already 
described, as an act of bare will, and the world as a mere 
effect, a separate, externally posited, existence. But this 
kind of factual externality, if asserted of material objects, 
could not long be maintained in regard to the spiritual 
creation, though just here, from another point of view, the 
independence involved in real creation is, as we have seen, 
most marked. Already, in the old Hebrew story, man is 
made in the image of God, and it is through the breath of 
God that he becomes a living soul. And the direct ethico- 
religious relation of man to God, which was the essential 
characteristic of the new religion — the idea of the heavenly 
Father, which was the burden of the teaching of Jesus — 
made it impossible to treat the divine and the human simply 
on the footing of cause and effect. While the doctrine 
of the Word made flesh, which so soon became the central 
dogma of the faith — asserting with a stupendous simplicity 
that God became man — made an end, in principle, of mere 
monotheistic transcendence. Hence in Origen, the first 



308 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

philosophical theologian of the Church in any larger sense, 
we have, as already mentioned, the doctrine of an eternal 
creation, which, as the continual product of the changeless 
divine will, becomes an expression of the divine nature 
rather than the outcome of will in the sense of choice. 
Origen applies this conception primarily to the world of 
free spirits which he describes as ' surrounding the Deity 
like an ever-living garment '. He gives a more fantastic 
account of the material world, but he rightly regards it as 
secondary to the existence and function of the spiritual 
creation. On similar lines modern idealism, as represented 
by Professor Bosanquet, while treating the whole universe 
as organically one, regards the material world fundamentally 
as that ' through which spirit attains incarnation ' — ' a sys- 
tem by which the content of finite minds is defined and 
their individuality manifested ' — the instrument, as it were, 
through which the only real creation, that of minds, is 
worked out. And thus, although finite minds exist only 
through nature, nature in the last resort ' exists only through 
finite mind V 

On such a general view, the idea of creation tends to 
pass into that of manifestation — not the making of some- 
thing out of nothing, but the revelation in and to finite 
spirits of the infinite riches of the divine life. It was in 
this sense that theologians and the makers of creeds and 
confessions came to speak of ' the glory of God ' as the 
supreme end and meaning of creation. The phrase has 
proved in some respects an unfortunate one, in so far as it 
tends to suggest the idea of self-glorification and display, 
as of a despot feeding on servile adulation. But in its 
religious intention it is to be interpreted in this sense of 
self-communication, intensification of life through realiza- 
tion of the life of others. In this sense we may take Plato's 
great words in the Timaeus : ' Let me tell, then, why the 
1 Individuality and Value, pp. 133, 135, 371. 



xvi THE SELF-IMPARTING GOD 309 

Creator created and made the universe. He was good . . . 
and being free from jealousy he desired that all things 
should be as like himself as possible.' It is in this spirit, 
too, that Hegel so often tells us that the Christian, that 
is to say, in his view, the final religious, idea of God is 
that of the self-revealing or self -imparting God. And this 
again is the philosophical meaning of the saying that God 
is Love. 

We begin to see, then, that creation cannot be understood 
unless in reference to the subjects or conscious existences in 
which it terminates. The objective world is a creation, or 
rather, as we have said, a revelation in and to them, * there 
being ', as Berkeley once put it, ' nothing new to God '. 
Such a position need not, however, involve us in the sub- 
jective or individualistic idealism of Berkeley; all that it 
means is that we refuse to take one element or moment in a 
process and treat it statically as a fact on its own account. 
And we must be in earnest with this principle throughout; 
for it applies to God and finite minds, the apparent begin- 
ning and end of the process, just as much as to nature, the 
intermediary or connecting term. They also cannot be sub- 
stantiated as static units apart from the process in which 
they live or which constitutes their life. In the case of the 
finite conscious being this is fairly obvious, for he plainly 
receives his filling from nature and is reduced at once to 
a bare point or empty focus if we attempt to lift him, as an 
independent unitary existence, out of the universal life from 
which he draws his spiritual sustenance. But it is apt not 
to be so obvious in the case of God. And yet, in this ulti- 
mate reference, it is equally essential to be clear on the point, 
if we are not to involve ourselves in meaningless speculation. 
Hardly any philosophy has avoided such speculation or at 
least the appearance of it. Even a theory like Hegel's, 
which insists so strongly on the idea of creation as an eternal 
act or an eternal process, seems repeatedly by its form of 



310 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

statement to suggest just that prior existence of the bare 
universal which it is the essence of the theory to deny. 

The misleading suggestion referred to may be illustrated 
by the more naive statements of Janet, to whom, however, 
by reason of his doctrine of final causes, it was more than 
simply a defective form of expression. * The insoluble 
problem ', says Janet, 1 ' is this : Why is there anything but 
God? Whether it be held that God produced the world by 
a necessary emanation or that he created it freely, the diffi- 
culty still remains — why did he create it, why did he not 
remain wrapped up in himself?' 'We conceive', he says 
again, 2 ' two periods in the divine life, whether historically 
or logically distinct does not here much concern us. In the 
first period, God is in himself, collected, concentrated, gath- 
ered in himself in his indivisible unity. This unity is . . . 
the absolute concentration of being : it is the plenum, God 
being thus conceived as the absolute unity, act and con- 
sciousness. Creation commences when God comes out of 
himself, and thinks something else than himself.' The cause 
of the universe, he says once more, ' is beforehand, entirely 
and in itself, an absolute '. 3 Hence it is that we are con- 
fronted with the old difficulty, ' the wherefore of creation '. 4 
Now such a problem is certainly, as he says, insoluble, but we 
have created the difficulty for ourselves by substantiating 
God as a solitary unit apart from the universe in which he 
expresses himself. As Ulrici puts it, God is known to us as 
creator of the world; we have no datum, no justification 
whatever, for supposing his existence out of that relation, 
' wrapped up in himself,' as Janet puts it, ' entirely and in 
himself an absolute '. 

And yet thinkers much more profound than Janet appear 
to be embarrassed by the same kind of problem. The 
whole systematic structure of German idealism in Fichte 

1 Final Causes, p. 447 (English translation). 2 Ibid., p. 437. 

8 Ibid., p. 375- 4 Ibid., p. 445- 



xvi FALLACIOUS ATTEMPTS AT DEDUCTION *n 



and Hegel might almost be cited in evidence. Think only of 
Fichte's laborious and futile attempts in the Wissenschafts- 

lehre to deduce the Xon-Ego or object from the Absolute 
Ego or bare subject with which he starts. The Absolute Ego. 
he says. ' is absolutely identical with itself . . . there is 
nothing here to be distinguished, no multiplicity. The Ego 
is everything and is nothing, because it is nothing for itself.' 
Yet he proceeds to represent it as an infinite outward striv- 
ing, which somehow manages at the same time to throw an 
obstacle in its own way. by impinging against which it is 
driven back upon itself. By this reflection or return upon 
itself it attains to self-consciousness, that is to say. first 
becomes an Ego in any real sense of the word. The purely 
illusory character of this attempt to conjure bare object out 
of bare subject is obvious. It is hopeless to try to construct 
a concrete self-consciousness out of the interaction of these 
abstractions : and. when challenged. Fichte tells us. as we 
might expect, that he never contemplated what would be 
comparable to the absurdity of writing a man's biography 
before his birth. * Consciousness '. he declares, ' exists with 
all its determinations at a stroke, just as the universe is an 
organic whole, no part of which can exist without all the 
rest — something, therefore, which cannot have come gradu- 
ally into being, but must necessarily have been there in its 
completeness at any period when it existed at all.' He tells 
us. in other words, that he has not been narrating what ever 
took place, but giving a logical analysis of self-consciousness 
into its distinguishable but inseparable moments or aspects. 
We must accept the disclaimer, and yet the start with an 
abstract One. and the persistent attempt to make it posit its 
own other and thereby generate all the multiplicity of the 
world ' out of the unit of itself ' z is significant of a deep- 
seated tendency of thought. We meet it again in Hegel's 
start with the pure Idea which "' passes over '. or ' lets itself 
1 A phrase of Martineau's, applied by him. however, in another reference. 



3 i2 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

go ', into Nature in order to return thence and be at home 
with itself as Spirit. We meet it even more unmistakably in 
the elaborate construction of the divine nature in his Philos- 
ophy of Religion. What Hegel is really doing, of course, 
or intending to do, is to emphasize the truth that if we start 
reflectively with a One, we find that it inevitably involves a 
Many, for it is only as the unity of a multiplicity that you 
know it as one; or, similarly, the idea of subject implies an 
object of which it is conscious — through which alone it can 
be a subject. In the world of reality, therefore, there is no 
possibility of a start with a mere One or a mere subject, for 
these are the abstractions of reflective analysis. The 
Hegelian principle of logical implication is, in short, when 
applied to the case of God and the world, the demonstration 
of the very principle of eternal creation for which we have 
contended. God exists as creatively realizing himself in the 
world, just as the true Infinite is not a mere Beyond, but is 
present in the finite as its sustaining and including life. 
Hence Hegel's recurring polemic against the God of Deism, 
whom he styles, in so many words, the unknown God. And 
yet, adopting for his own purposes the old Platonic idea of 
the Logos, as developed by Alexandrian and Christian think- 
ers into the doctrine of a trinity in the divine nature, he is 
led in the course of his exposition, not infrequently, to use 
expressions which involuntarily recall the old conception of 
a succession of stages in the divine reality — what Janet calls 

* periods in the divine life '. He tells us, for example, that 

* the starting-point and point of departure ' is ' the abso- 
lutely undivided self-sufficing One'; or, again, 'Eternal 
Being, in and for itself, is something which unfolds itself, 
determines itself, differentiates itself, posits itself as its own 
difference V In the same sense he speaks of ' the advance of 
the Idea to manifestation '. The constant use of the term 
' posit ' in this connexion, and the recurring expression 

1 Philosophy of Religion, vol. iii, p. 35 (English translation). 



xvi HEGEL AND THE ALEXANDRIANS 313 

' diremption ', have the same suggestion of the bare subject 
producing its object or of the pre-existing unit opening itself 
out into a multiplicity. Philosophical reflection on the 
implications of thought is hypostatized in such passages 
into an actual process generative of reality. 

This deceptive priority finds, of course, striking expres- 
sion in the historical doctrine with which Hegel connects his 
philosophical exposition, the eternally begotten Son of the 
Father. If we recognize that we are not talking here of two 
separate individuals, two Gods, then the origination of the 
one by the other, even when stated to be an eternal act, is 
plainly a figure of speech. The Father, in theological lan- 
guage, knows himself in the Son, that is to say, the Son is 
the object without which a divine self-consciousness were 
impossible. Or, again, we are told, God utters himself, first 
becomes articulate, in the Son, who is called on that account, 
the Word. But there is no existence of God at all with- 
out self-consciousness, without such self-articulation. The 
Father consequently, if conceived even ideally as prior, is 
simply the abstraction of the empty subject; and, as handled 
in the metaphysical creeds, the idea may be said to represent 
the inveterate tendency of our thought to try to get beyond 
or behind the ultimate, to project a more abstract God 
behind the living God, as somehow bringing the latter into 
being. This is still more apparent in the form in which the 
doctrine first specifically appeared in Philo of Alexandria. 
To Philo the Logos is expressly ' the second God ', and, as 
immanent, is knowable; but God himself, or the transcend- 
ent Deity, is exalted above determination by any of the 
predicates known to finite intelligence. He is anoios. The 
kindred speculations of the Neo-Platonists show us the same 
tendency and the same result. Plotinus teaches that Mind, 
as already containing plurality in its unity, must have come 
forth from the One, which precedes all thought and being. 
Proclus, who devises an intermediate principle to bridge 



314 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

the gulf between the two, describes the transcendent Source 
as a principle in its nature completely ineffable {avrrj 
apprjroS apxv)- And Scotus Erigena, the Western inheritor 
of their philosophy, declares that ' on account of his super- 
eminence God may not improperly be called Nothing V 
Thus thought, grasping at the transcendent, and seeking 
something more real than reality, overleaps itself and falls 
into the abyss of absolute nothingness. ' Abyss/ indeed, was 
one of the names which the Gnostics gave to this imaginary 
prius of the rational cosmos. 

God, then, becomes an abstraction if separated from the 
universe of his manifestation, just as the finite subjects 
have no independent subsistence outside of the universal 
Life which mediates itself to them in a world of objects. 
We may conceive God as an experience in which the uni- 
verse is felt and apprehended as an ultimately harmonious 
whole; and we must, of course, distinguish between such 
an infinite experience and the experiences of ourselves and 
other finite persons. But we have no right to treat either 
out of relation to the other. We have no right to suppose 
the possibility of such an infinite experience as a solitary 
monad — an absolute, in the old sense of the term already 
condemned, self-sufficient and entirely independent of the 
finite intelligences to whom, in the actual world which we 
know, it freely communicates itself. Coleridge, it is true, 
represents this as the fundamental difference between 
Spinozism and the Christian scheme, that whereas to Spinoza 
the world without God and God without the world are both 

1 In Meister Eckhart, the devout mystic, there is a similar distinction 
between ' God ', the knowable Creator, and the original ground, beyond 
Being and Knowledge, which he calls ' the Godhead ', and which he also 
characterizes by predilection as the Nothing, or ' unnatured nature ', not 
only unknown and unknowable to man, but unknown also to itself. The 
Godhead, as he says in the extremity of his paradox, dwells in the noth- 
ing of nothing which was before nothing, and it is apprehended only in 
the knowledge that is a not-knowing. (The passage is quoted in 
Ueberweg's History of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 474, English translation.) 



xvi GOD AND THE WORLD 315 

alike impossible ideas (W— G=oandG— W=o), for Chris- 
tian thought the world without God is likewise an impos- 
sibility, but God without the world is the self-subsistent 
(W— G=o, but G— W=G). I may quote in reply the 
comment of my old teacher, on this ingenious play of sym- 
bols. ' This is applicable to the Christian scheme only as 
popularly understood,' comments Fraser, ' not a few though- 
ful Christians holding by the absolute correlation of God and 
the world as an inference necessarily deducible from the 
moral nature or personality of God.' * ' We may not take for 
granted ', he says again, ' that the Divine Source of the life 
in which we now are, is not eternally the Source of light and 
life to intelligences, active and responsible for their actions, 
like ourselves.' 2 Creation, in short, if it is taken to mean 
anything akin to efficient causation, is totally unfitted to 
express any relation that can exist between spirits. Spirits 
cannot be regarded as things made, detached like products 
from their maker; they are more aptly described, in the 
Biblical phrase, as ' partakers of the divine nature ' and 
admitted to the fellowship of a common life. But if so, 
there can be no ground for the supposition of a pre-existent 
Deity, not yet crowned with the highest attribute of Good- 
ness or self-revealing Love. God's ' glory ' (in the theologi- 
cal phrase already referred to) is not something adventitious, 
subsequently added to the mode of his existence; it is as 
eternal as his being. The divine life is essentially, I have 
contended, this process of self-communication. Or, to put it 
in more abstract philosophical language, the infinite in and 
through the finite, the finite in and through the infinite — this 
mutual implication is the ultimate fact of the universe as 
we know it. It is the eternal fashion of the cosmic Life. 

How is such a position distinguishable, it may be asked, 

from the Pluralism advocated by thinkers like Professor 

1 Essay on ' M. Saisset and Spinoza ', North British Review, vol. 
xxxviii, p. 463. 2 Ibid., p. 487. 



316 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

Howison or Dr. McTaggart? In denying any priority of 
the infinite to the finite, our view seems in danger of attrib- 
uting an independent reality to the latter, and thus resolving 
the universe into a collection of self-subsistent individuals. 
That is, in fact, the conclusion at which Professor Howison 
arrives, in revulsion from a Monism which, by making the 
Absolute the sole determining agent in whatever happens, 
leaves no place in its scheme for the existence of self-active 
moral persons. Now it is the essential postulate of morality, 
as we have ourselves seen, that the acts of the self-conscious 
individual are his own acts, not to be fathered on any ' nature 
of things ', and that every self-conscious being is in this sense 
a free and originative source of activity. But, says Pro- 
fessor Howison, ' no being that arises out of efficient causa- 
tion can possibly be free. . . . Not even Divine agency can 
give rise to another self-active intelligence by any productive 
act.' And therefore he concludes to ' an eternal Pluralism ' 
— a ' society of minds ' or ' circle of self-thinking spirits \ in 
which God is indeed ' the central member ' but ' only as 
primus inter pares \ ' The members of this Eternal Repub- 
lic have no origin but their purely logical one of reference 
to each other. . . . They simply are, and together constitute 
the eternal order.' x 

With all that Professor Howison says about * thinking 
in terms of spirit ' and discarding the ' old efficient-causal 
notion of Divine being and function ', I feel the greatest 
sympathy, as also with his insistence on what he rather 
happily terms the inherent ' source fulness ' of self -conscious- 
ness. I have also already adverted to the contradiction 
which appears to be involved in the origin of a self. Such 
origin is inconceivable as the result of action from without, 
and hence the self appears to us as its own creation; but to 
make it the result of its own action is obviously to presup- 

1 The Limits of Evolution and other Essays illustrating the Meta- 
physical Theory of Personal Idealism, pp. 332-4, 289, 277, 256, 359, 337. 



xvi AN 'ETERNAL REPUBLIC ' 317 

pose the very existence we are seeking to explain. Never- 
theless, every child which grows to manhood exemplifies 
anew the fact of origination which we find it so difficult to 
formulate. And again, from the nature of the case, we 
cannot get behind the ' sourceful ' Ego, and therefore none 
of us can imagine either a beginning or an end of his exist- 
ence ; the knowing self seems as eternal as the universe. Yet 
this apparent eternity of the intellect is combined in our 
experience with a conviction of utter dependence; for which 
of us, as Descartes asks, feels himself able to guarantee his 
own continuance in existence from one moment to another? 
I cannot agree, then, that because a self is a genuine source 
of activity, it is therefore necessarily eternal and self-sub- 
sistent. Nor do I think that Professor Howison's too sub- 
jectively Kantian view of the a priori legislative function of 
the mind in the ' making ' of Nature can be regarded, even 
if it were true, as a convincing proof of the thesis for which 
he is arguing. Professor Howison does not hesitate to 
speak of man and other finite intelligences as ' nature-beget- 
ting minds '. We are ' ourselves the causal sources of the 
perceived world and its cosmic order ' ; ' the laws of nature 
must issue from the free actor himself, and upon a world 
consisting of states of his own consciousness, a world in so 
far of his own making.' He makes a point, indeed, of this 
' Pluralistic -Idealism ', as contrasted with ' the idealistic 
monism that has so long dominated philosophical theism \ 
1 Not God only, but also the entire world of free minds other 
than God, must condition Nature.' In fact, the finite minds 
are alone ' directly and productively causal of it, while 
God's conditioning of it can only be indirect and remote; 
namely, by the constant reference to him which these nature- 
begetting minds spontaneously have V 

But surely under cover of this indirect causation — this 
constant reference to a divine centre — we give the whole 
1 Ibid., pp. 302, 325-6. 



318 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

pluralistic case away. We are reinstating in such phrases 
the objective system of nature — the common world — of 
which the independent action of so many individual minds 
offers no manner of guarantee. Professor Howison tells us 
that the finite minds ' spontaneously have '. this reference, 
and he talks elsewhere of ' the benign consensus of the whole 
society of minds V But if we are not to treat such a con- 
sensus as the miraculous result of chance, what other expla- 
nation of it can we give than that the plurality is based upon 
a deeper unity of system? Professor Howison's .scheme 
appears to work only because he postulates an identical 
content or system of reason common to all his self-active 
intelligences. The society of which he speaks is described 
by himself as ' a universal rational society ', or, more ex- 
plicitly still, as ' an association of beings united by a common 
rational intelligence '. This community of nature extends 
not only to the abstract categories of the pure intellect, but 
also to the governing conceptions of ethical and aesthetic 
experience. Speaking of God and human souls, he says, ' As 
complete reason is his essence, so is reason their essence — 
their nature in the large — whatever may be the varying 
conditions under which their selfhood, the required pecu- 
liarity of each, may bring it to appear. Each of them has 
its own ideal of its own being, namely, its own way of ful- 
filling the character of God. . . . Moreover, since this ideal, 
seen eternally in God, is the chosen goal of every conscious- 
ness, it is the final — not the efficient — cause of the whole 
existing self.' The relations between the Divine and the 
human indicated by such phrases as a common essence and 
an immanent ideal 2 are of a character so intimate and so 
unique as to make the metaphor of a ' republic ' — the whole 



1 p. 276. 

2 PP- 339-40- Cf. Preface, p. xxx. ' The theistic ideal of God imma- 
nent in the world by the activity of his image in the mind of Man, the 
only Divine Immanence compatible with the moral freedom of the soul.' 



xvi PLURALITY BASED ON DEEPER UNITY 319 

idea of an association of independent individuals — totally 
inapplicable to the facts. 

I think I understand the motives of Professor Howison's 
insistence on a certain equality of status among all persons, 
as such, consequently even as between the human self and 
God. He has clearly perceived that a self-conscious being 
is, by his very nature, raised above the sphere of efficient 
causality as that operates in a world of things. Such a being 
is inaccessible to force or action from without : nothing can 
be effected in a self except through the personal will of the 
agent himself. A person cannot be coerced, he can only be 
persuaded; and if he is effectually persuaded, his decision 
becomes the expression of his whole nature. Short of such 
ratification we have gained nothing, for, as the adage has it, 
a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. 
In such a sphere, then, the only causation is final causation, 
the causation of the ideal, as it is expressed in Aristotle's 
doctrine of the prime mover, or again, in the language of 
Christianity, * I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all 
men unto myself \ ' Hence the divine love ', as Professor 
Howison happily puts it, ' is a love which holds the individu- 
ality, the personal initiative of its object sacred. . . . The 
Father of Spirits will have his image brought forth in every 
one of his offspring by the thought and conviction of each 
soul itself. . . . [Accordingly] the moral government of 
God, springing from the Divine Love, is a government by 
moral agencies purely. . . . Leaving aside all the juridical 
enginery of reward and punishment, it lets his sun shine and 
his rain fall alike on the just and the unjust, that the cause 
of God may everywhere win simply upon its merits.' * This 
central conception of the inviolable nature of personality is 
likewise the gist of the phrase of which Professor Howison 
makes important use, both in the careful summary of doc- 
trine prefixed to his book and elsewhere — ' the mutual 

1 pp. 257-8. 



320 THE IDEA OF CREATION lect. 

recognition of all minds \ ' This mutual recognition is 
involved ', he says, ' in the self -defining act by which each 
subsists, and is the condition of their co-existence as a moral 
order.' But it holds not only between one finite spirit and 
another; it characterizes equally, as we have just seen, the 
divine attitude to the human self. In truth the moral recog- 
nition of the world of spirits by God is the intelligible mean- 
ing of the metaphor of creation, and it is an eternal act or 
fact, Professor Howison urges, which is the expression of 
His own nature as a perfect moral being. 1 

With such a statement of the case I have not much fault 
to find; it is, indeed, practically identical with the concep- 
tion of creation which we have ourselves adopted. But it is 
pluralism only so far as it is a protest against the completely 
non-ethical idea of God as a solitary unit. The notion of 
God is indeed inseparable from that of a spiritual commu- 
nity. But so long as we apply the terms infinite and perfect 
to God and speak of Him, with Professor Howison, as ' the 
fulfilled Type of every mind and the living Bond of their 
union ', such a view is misrepresented by phrases which seem 
to make God one individual mind among a number of equally 
self-subsistent individuals, which ' spontaneously ', but inex- 
plicably, coincide in certain characteristics and in certain 
ideals. However impious and intolerable one may feel the 
image of the potter and the clay, however certain one may 
be that the integrity of the self-conscious being is involved 
in the very perfection of the divine nature, still the relation 
between the finite spirit and its inspiring source must be, in 
the end, incapable of statement in terms of the relation of 
one finite individual to another. To treat God as no more 
than primus inter pares is to lose touch both with speculation 
and religion. Professor Howison, in the phrases to which I 

1 Preface, pp. xiii-xvii. Cf. p. 355 : ' An absolutely perfect mind, or 
God, whose very perfection lies in his giving complete recognition to all 
other spirits, as the complement in terms of which alone his own self- 
definition is to himself completely thinkable.' 



xvi ' PRIMUS INTER PARES ' 321 

refer, seems to use the idea of self-consciousness entirely as 
a principle of separation and exclusion, which finitizes even 
what he calls ' the Supreme Instance ', the ' absolutely per- 
fect mind, or God \ Substantiating the selves in their 
mutual exclusiveness, he is further led to insist on the essen- 
tial eternity of every self as such, and to represent the 
universe as consisting of a definite number of such perma- 
nent finite souls plus God. With consequences like these, 
however, we pass from philosophical theism to a real plural- 
ism, such as is more consistently represented by Dr. McTag- 
gart's atheistic Absolute or by the doctrine of a finite God. 
The discussion of such theories, so far as it is called for 
after the establishment of our general position, falls in 
another place. 



LECTURE XVII 

TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE 

The idea of Purpose meets us in all the ordinary theologi- 
cal accounts of the relation of God to the world of finite 
things and persons; while philosophers are often found 
contending that the contrast between a teleological and 
a mechanical theory of the universe is the most radical of 
philosophical distinctions, and that a spiritual view of the 
world stands or falls with a teleological interpretation. We 
have seen, in the opening lecture, the central position 
assigned by Hume to the ' argument from design ' in its 
older form. Although, as a philosopher, he denies its coer- 
cive force, yet Philo, speaking to Cleanthes as man to man, 
frankly admits the difficulty of escaping from it. ' In many 
views of the universe and of its parts, particularly the 
latter, the beauty and fitness of final causes strikes us with 
such irresistible force, that all objections appear (what 
I believe they really are) cavils and sophisms.' In very 
similar terms Kant, in his classical criticism of the tradi- 
tional proofs of the existence of. God, although he exposes 
the limitations of the argument, refers to it as ' the oldest, 
the clearest, and that most in harmony with the common 
reason of mankind '. Purposive activity is, indeed, the 
central feature of our human experience; reason seems to 
operate in that experience characteristically under the form 
of End. Nevertheless there are manifest difficulties in 
transferring the conception of Purpose or End to the action, 
if we may so call it, of the Absolute, and in using it to 
describe the relation existing between God and the world 



xvii THE IDEA OF PURPOSE 323 

of his creatures. These difficulties have been so pressed 
by thinkers of the first rank that it is incumbent upon us 
to examine carefully whether the teleological point of view 
can be maintained in such a reference, and, if so, in what 
sense precisely the affirmation of Purpose is to be under- 
stood. Certain features of finite purpose, it is to be pre- 
sumed, must fall away; but when these are dropped, there 
may still remain a fundamental attitude of will (perhaps 
even of desire) which cannot be more fitly designated in 
mortal speech than by the time-honoured category of End or 
Purpose. 

It will, I think, again be convenient if I connect the dis- 
cussion with Professor Bosanquet's treatment of the same 
subject ; * for although in the opening or programme lecture 
of his first Gifford course he lays it down that ' a Teleology 
cannot be ultimate \ 2 and returns at the conclusion of the 
volume to repeat the position that ' it seems unintelligible 
for the Absolute or for any perfect experience to be a will 
or purpose ', he will be found, in a later handling of the 
subject, endeavouring to make room in his final conception 
for the essential core of the idea which he had rejected. 

The idea of Purpose, as we meet it in experience, appears 
to imply (1) desire for an as yet non-existent state of 
affairs, (2) the conception of a plan for bringing the desired 
state of affairs into existence by selection of appropriate 
means, (3) the act of will proper, which realizes or carries 
out this plan. The final stage or aspect of the process may 
involve mole or less difficulty, but it seems in any case to 
involve the adaptation of means to an end. Purpose in 
this sense is thus essentially a. feature of a life in time, and 
also, it would seem, characteristic of a finite individual in 

1 Especially in Individuality and Value, Lecture IV, ' The Teleology 
of Finite Consciousness \ Cf. Appendix I to Lecture X, pp. 391-3. 

2 p. 16. In the lecture devoted to the subject he begins with a disparag- 
ing reference to ' that popular principle of ethical and theistic idealism 
known in general as Teleology '. 



324 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

an orderly universe where connexion of means and end can 
be ascertained and relied upon. There is no reason, in short, 
to object to Professor Bosanquet's description of ' de facto 
purpose ' as ' a psychological, temporal, and ethical idea V 
Our question, then, is, Do these features of the idea dis- 
qualify it utterly as a principle of cosmic interpretation? 
Some of them we easily recognize as inapplicable in such 
a sphere. But because the conception is derived, like all 
our ideas, from the facts of our own experience, is it there- 
fore essentially or exclusively a finite category? We have 
argued in these lectures throughout from the structure of 
experience, and it has been my contention that no other pro- 
cedure is reasonable or possible. In the case, then, of an idea 
so central as that of purpose, may we not expect that, when 
purged of demonstrably finite accompaniments, it will still 
help us to characterize truly the nature of the infinite 
Experience ? 

Familiar criticisms of ' the argument from design ' already 
indicate some of the features of finite activity which must 
be eliminated in speaking of a divine purpose. Thus the 
idea of contrivance — the skilful adjustment of means to 
end — so prominent in the traditional form of that argument, 
evidently implies a pre-existing or independently existing 
material whose capabilities limit and condition the realizing 
activity. At most, therefore, the proof would yield us, as 
Kant points out, an architect of the world, a kind of 
demiurge, ' not a creator to whom all things are subject \ 
J. S. Mill puts the same point more strongly : * It is not too 
much to say that every indication of design in the cosmos 
is so much evidence against the omnipotence of the designer. 
. . . Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming 
difficulties, and there is no room for them in a Being for 
whom no difficulties exist. The evidences therefore of 
Natural Theology distinctly imply that the author of the 
1 Individuality and Value, p. 217. 



xvii THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN 325 

cosmos worked under limitations : that he was obliged to 
adapt himself to conditions independent of his will and tu 
attain his ends by such arrangements as those conditions 
admitted of.' 1 And, as is well known, this dualistic posi- 
tion was the solution which Mill was on the whole inclined 
to adopt. In truth the traditional form of the argument 
seems to represent the Creator as originating a material 
which has no relation to his purposes — which has no forma- 
tive nisus in itself — and which has therefore to be moulded 
into accordance with his ends, and directed in its course, 
by a supplementary exhibition of the divine wisdom. It is 
as if the existence of the material were referred simply to 
the divine power — treated as a result of the fiat of omnipo- 
tence — the superinduction of order and plan being a subse- 
quent operation of the divine wisdom, specially calculated 
to serve as a proof of the divine existence. But apart from 
the criticism that this comes perilously near to creating diffi- 
culties in order to solve them with credit, it is obviously 
inadmissible to treat matter and form in this way as initially 
unrelated to one another. Yet it is this contingent relation 
which forms the nerve of the argument from design, as 
Kant three times emphasizes in the course of his short state- 
ment. ' This arrangement of means and ends is entirely 
foreign to the things existing in the world — it belongs to 
them merely as a contingent attribute.' So Janet writes 
more recently : ' What essentially constitutes finality is that 
the relation of the parts to the whole is contingent: it is 
just this that is finality.' Janet goes on to imply that the 
alternative to such finality is ' blind necessity '. ' If it be 
admitted that matter, obeying necessary laws, must perforce 
take the form of an organism fit for a certain function, 
the idea of finality must be sacrificed and only blind neces- 
sity be admitted.' 2 And Kant similarly indicates that the 

1 Three Essays on Religion, pp. 176-7. 

2 Final Causes, pp. 436-7. 



326 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

argument depends on the contrast between ' a free and 
intelligent cause ' and ' a blind all-powerful nature, produc- 
ing the beings and events which fill the world in unconscious 
fecundity \ 

But, on fuller reflection, can anything be more illegiti- 
mate than to treat one stage of the divine action as essentially 
unrelated to those which are to follow — to substantiate 
mechanism or, in Janet's phrase, ' nature obeying necessary 
laws ', as if it were in no sense the vehicle or medium of 
the divine manifestation but almost a rival and hostile 
power, so that whatever mechanism can do is not * of God ' 
but the outcome of ' blind necessity '. We cannot treat 
the substructure of the universe in this way as going by 
itself, and introduce purposive intelligence at a later stage 
to effect more delicate adjustments and shape the cosmos 
towards its finer issues. The process of the universe — and 
we are looking at it now as a process — must be taken as a 
whole, in which the spirit of the whole is everywhere 
present. Hence, the strong emphasis which Professor 
Bosanquet lays on the principle of continuity commands 
our sympathy, even although it seems to lead him to cham- 
pion mechanism against teleology, and makes him express 
his conclusions at times in an almost naturalistic form. As 
he points out, ' the processes of inorganic nature are physi- 
cally continuous with and essential to the processes of life, 
and if the latter are teleological, the former can hardly be 
less so. . . . Much of the work done by inorganic forces, 
e. g. the change of rock into soil, are obvious conditions 
of the adaptation of the earth to life. . . . The continuity 
of the earth's geological structure with social and historical 
teleology is obvious. They plainly and essentially belong 
to the same process.' Taking the case of a flower, he indi- 
cates the two extremes we have to avoid. i On the one 
hand it is ridiculous to say that such a product arises by 
accident; that is, as a by-product of the interaction of 



xvii NATURAL SELECTION AND PURPOSE 327 

elements in whose nature and general laws of combination 
no such result is immanent.' On the other hand, we must 
not ascribe to the flower ' an end or idea somehow super- 
induced upon the course of [its] elements by a power 
comparable to finite consciousness, operating as it were 
ab extra and out of a detached spontaneity of its own. . . . 
In the structure and being of the flower the natural elements 
behave according to what they are/ But ' we must inter- 
pret the nature of nature as much by the flower as by the 
law of gravitation V 

This is the position so strongly insisted on throughout 
our first series of lectures, more especially in dealing with 
the phenomenon of life; and the modern theory of organic 
development seems to me strikingly to support such a view. 
Much controversy, of a more or less intelligent kind, has 
raged round the doctrine of evolution and the argument 
from design. Many have proclaimed on the housetops that 
the idea of purpose has been definitively exploded by the 
modern theory of natural selection; while others have con- 
tended that the evolutionary process does but broaden and 
deepen the conception of a cosmic teleology. The scientific 
doctrine, or, one may quite fairly say, the scientific facts, 
do, it seems to me, deal a fatal blow to the ' artificer ' idea, 2 
which is the pivot of the argument from design in its familiar 
form. The eye certainly suggests the idea of special con- 
trivance more forcibly, if we look simply at the complex 
and delicate mechanism of the perfected organ in the higher 
animals, than if we view its structure as a gradual refine- 
ment, through countless intermediate stages, upon the 
pigment spots which serve some of the lowest organisms 
to discriminate roughly between light and darkness. But 



1 Cf. Individuality and Value, pp. 146-9. 

2 Dr. Chalmers in his Natural Theology refers the origin of organic 
structure to ' the finger of an artificer ' — the direct ' fiat and interposi- 
tion of a God' {Institutes of Theology, vol. i, pp. 79-81). 



328 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

to bring in the operation of natural selection through 
environmental conditions, and to regard an organ as thus 
fashioned from rude beginnings by the cumulative action 
of such factors in the past, is not to eliminate teleology. 
Rather, by relating the development of the organ to the 
general course of things, it is to bring both organ and 
environment within the scope of one ' increasing purpose \ 
This was clearly put by Huxley as early as 1869 in criticiz- 
ing the youthful extravagances of Haeckel. ' No doubt it 
is quite true ', he says, ' that the doctrine of Evolution is 
the most formidable opponent of all the commoner and 
coarser forms of Teleology. But perhaps the most remark- 
able service to the philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. 
Darwin is the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology, 
and the explanation of the facts of both which his views 
offer.' * 

The modern scientific view thus tends to coincide with the 
ideal outlined by Kant at the close of the Critique of Pure 
Reason — ' the systematic unity of nature ', conceived as 
' complete teleological unity.' 2 This ideal, ' essentially and 
indissolubly connected with the nature of our reason and 
prescribing the very law of its operation ', 3 . impels us ' to 
regard all order in the world as if it originated from the 

1 Collected Essays, vol. ii, ' Darwiniana ', p. 109. Cf. Professor Asa 
Gray's statement : ' Let us recognize Darwin's great service to natural 
science in bringing back to it Teleology : so that instead of Morphology 
versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology ' 
(quoted in Darwin's Life and Letters, vol. ii, p. 189), and the statement 
of Francis Darwin (in the same volume, p. 255) : 'One of the greatest 
services rendered by my father to the study of natural history is the 
revival of Teleology. The evolutionist studies the purpose or meaning 
of organs with the zeal of the older teleology but with far wider and 
more coherent purpose. He has the invigorating knowledge that he is 
gaining not isolated conceptions of the economy of the present, but a 
coherent view of both past and present' 

2 Vollstandige zweckmassige Einheit. 

3 Gesetzgebend. Or, as he otherwise expresses it, this unity is ' not 
merely an economical device of reason, of hypothetical validity. Reason 
here does not request but demand! 



xvii ' THE SYSTEMATIC UNITY OF NATURE ' 329 

intention and design of a supreme reason \ But, as he wisely 
adds, ' the agency of a Supreme Being is not to be invoked 
by a species of ignava ratio to explain particular phenomena, 
instead of investigating their causes in the general mechan- 
ism of matter. This is to consider the labour of reason 
ended when we have merely dispensed with its employment, 
which is guided surely and safely only by the order of nature 
and the series of changes in the world — which are arranged 
according to immanent and general laws. This error may be 
avoided if we do not merely consider certain parts of nature 
from the point of view of finality, such as the division and 
structure of a continent, the constitution and direction of 
certain mountain chains, or even the organization existing 
in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, but look upon this 
systematic unity of nature in a perfectly general way in rela- 
tion to the idea of a Supreme Intelligence. If we pursue 
this advice, ... we possess a regulative principle of the 
systematic unity of a teleological connexion, which we do not 
attempt to anticipate or predetermine.' ' We cannot ', he 
repeats, ' overlook the general laws of nature and regard this 
conformity to aims observable in nature as contingent or 
hyperphysical in its origin. . . . The whole aim of this 
regulative principle is the discovery of a necessary and sys- 
tematic unity in nature, and hence, when we have discovered 
such a unity, it should be perfectly indifferent whether we 
say God has wisely willed it so or nature has wisely arranged 
this/ 

The whole ideal thus sketched constitutes an emphatic 
repudiation, on Kant's part, of what he had himself signal- 
ized as characteristic of the old argument — the view of 
purpose as external and contingent, super-induced upon the 
facts and manifested only in particular contrivances of 
nature. Kant transfers the idea of purpose to the whole as a 
systematic and intelligible unity. And in applying his princi- 
ples, in the Critique of Judgment, to the special case of the 



330 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

organism, he points out that it is just because the peculiar 
unity which characterizes such a whole and its members 
appears to us contingent with reference to the general laws 
of matter, that we seek to explain it by a pre-conceived plan 
or purpose, that is to say, by the idea of the whole in some 
mind prior to the actual existence of the whole in question. 
But this mode of explanation, he repeatedly suggests, may 
well be due to the nature of our understanding which, as a 
faculty of notions, dependent upon sensibility for its 
material, proceeds always from the parts to the whole, and 
consequently regards the connexion of the parts in that 
particular fashion as contingent. ' We can, however, con- 
ceive of an understanding, not discursive like ours but intui- 
tive, which proceeds from a synthetical universal (the 
intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i. e. from 
whole to parts.' Such an understanding would see ' the 
possibility of the parts as dependent on the whole in regard 
to both their specific nature and their interconnexion '. 
Here, therefore, there would be no such separation as we 
popularly make between means and end; the whole would 
not appear as an end, and the parts as means adapted to 
realize it. The relation of means and end in the ordinary 
sense would vanish ; for the whole would appear as the nec- 
essary unity of its members, and the members as the neces- 
sary differentiation of the whole. Hence Kant holds that the 
mechanical and the teleological explanation of the facts 
are not ultimately contradictory, although the teleological 
remains the final or inclusive point of view. And when we 
analyse our real meaning in the light of Kant's suggestion, 
we see clearly that, in attributing purposiveness to the uni- 
verse or any lesser whole, what we are concerned about is the 
character of the reality in question and not the pre-existence 
of a plan of it in anybody's mind. A teleological view of the 
universe means the belief that reality is a significant whole. 
When teleology in this sense is opposed to a purely mechani- 



xvii REALITY A SIGNIFICANT WHOLE 331 

cal theory, it means substantially the assertion of an intelli- 
gible whole as against the idea of reality as a mere aggregate 
or collocation of independent facts. When Trendelenburg, 1 
for example, speaks of the teleologists as asserting the pri- 
ority of thought, and their opponents the priority of what 
he calls blind force, what he means by such priority is not 
a bare mind existing first and calling matter into being, but 
simply the inherently intelligible nature of reality. Accord- 
ing to his own illustration, the universe has not chanced on 
its present apparently intelligible structure as the result of 
infinite castings of the cosmic dice, much as the Iliad or the 
tragedy of Hamlet might be supposed to be a collocation of 
letters accidentally arrived at in the course of infinite 
shufflings of the alphabetic symbols. Rationality is not a 
lucky accident of this description; it is the fundamental 
feature of the world. Intelligibility, as we actually discover 
it, and as we everywhere presume it, means that the world 
is the expression or embodiment of thought. In this sense 
mens agitat molem ; reason is present at every stage as the 
shaping spirit of the whole. 

If we discard, accordingly, in a cosmic reference the idea 
of a preconceived plan and the whole conception of contri- 
vance or skill in the overcoming of difficulties, with the 
separation of means and end which it involves, we seem 
furnished with an answer to another of Professor Bosan- 
quet's criticisms, namely, that teleology, ' in the sense of 
aiming at the unfulfilled, gives an unreal importance to time 
and to the part of any whole — it may be a relatively trivial 
part — which happens to come last in succession \ To pro- 
claim the End as the true principle of explanation, we may 
reply, is no more than to insist, in Hegel's phrase, that the 
True is the Whole. Taken from the point of view of proc- 
ess, the principle says ' await the issue ', see what it all comes 

1 In his essay, Ueber den letzten Unterschied der philosophischen 
Systeme. 



332 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

to. Do not attempt to thrust things back upon their first 
beginnings, or try to take these beginnings out of relation to 
what has followed from them. It is the characteristic of 
Naturalism thus to substantiate the antecedents in abstrac- 
tion from their consequents. But, as I have already insisted, 
the true nature of the antecedents, that is to say, of the 
apparent cause, is revealed only in the effects; and in this 
sense all ultimate or philosophical explanation must look to 
the end. Obviously, to such a teleology it is not the tempo- 
ral sequence which is the important thing. The end, indeed, 
must not be taken in abstraction any more than the beginning ; 
it must not be severed from the process of its realization. 
The last term is only important because in it is most fully 
revealed the nature of the principle which is present through- 
out. It is precisely this linkage of the first term with the 
last and, to that extent, the transcendence of the mere time- 
sequence in the conception of an eternal reality, that seems 
to me to be expressed by the profound Aristotelian idea of 
Te\o$ or End. 

But it is plain, as Professor Bosanquet argues, that the 
idea of Purpose or End, when we thus divest it of its finite 
incidents, tends to pass into that of Value. It is, as I have 
already said, the character of the whole which we have in 
view — not the historical fact of its having been purposed, but 
its nature as something worthy of being purposed, something 
fit, in short, to be the End of a Perfect Being. And it is in 
harmony with this sense of the term that theologians are 
wont to speak of the fundamental features of the universe 
as ' the eternal purpose ' of God. And the same sense re- 
appears in the test case of Spinoza's system, which appar- 
ently strides across the historical antithesis of mechanism 
and teleology. Spinoza passionately denounces the meta- 
physical use of the idea of Purpose or End, and appears 
therefore as the defender of mechanical necessity. But it 
would be a strange ruling which refused to see in Spinoza's 



xvii THE IDEA OF SATISFACTION 333 

system one of the great presentations of philosophical ideal- 
ism. After all, it is an external teleology, and especially 
a teleology too narrowly centred in man, which Spinoza 
repudiates, and for which he substitutes the idea of a self- 
realizing system. And Spinoza's necessity, we must remem- 
ber, is always the necessity of the divine nature, that is to 
say, it is the expression of the nature of the whole. We shall 
not do justice to his thought, therefore, unless we interpret it 
in the light of his goal rather than in the light of his starting- 
point — not by the formal definition of God as Substance but 
by the amor intellectualis Dei with which he closes, the intel- 
lectual love of the mind towards God, which is part of the 
infinite love with which God loves himself. Spinoza's con- 
clusion brings into full light the element which we have just 
found to be the essential characteristic of the teleological 
conception. From the ultimate stage of philosophical in- 
sight, at which the mind realizes the system of the whole 
and its own oneness with God, there springs, says Spinoza, 
' summa, quae dari potest, mentis acquiescentia, hoc est lae- 
titia ' ; and beatitudo is the note upon which he closes. 
Acquiescentia — the highest contentment of mind, Pollock 
translates ; acceptance as good, we might say. It is the 
human echo of the verdict put into the mouth of the divine 
Labourer — ' And God saw everything that he had made, and 
behold it was very good.' Or again, Spinoza says, this 
' acquiescence ' is not really distinguished from ' glory '. In 
this striking array of terms there is the same undertone of 
mystical exaltation as in Plato's famous words at the close 
of the Timaeus, in which he celebrates the world he 
has described as ' a god perceptible, greatest, best, fair- 
est and most perfect, the one only-begotten universe '. 
In these terms Spinoza enshrines his conviction that the 
world is not only one, but it is good : it is not only a 
system which we can understand, but one with which we can 
identify ourselves, and obtain thereby the highest satisfac- 



334 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

tion of which our nature is capable. This idea of satisfac- 
tion forms an integral part of any teleological view of the 
universe. The conception of a realized purpose involves the 
idea that the end is something worthy of attainment, an 
achievement in which the rational being can see the fulfil- 
ment, and far more than the fulfilment, of ' all the main 
tendencies of his nature V 

We meet here again, in short, the idea of value to which so 
much prominence was given in the first series of lectures and 
also in the earlier lectures of the present series. The idea is 
sometimes, I think, obscured in Hegelian arguments by the 
exclusive stress laid on the idea of unity and system. A 
principle of unity — the phrase which occurs so often in 
Caird for example — is in the end as bald and abstract a 
description of God or the Absolute as the much-derided 
' Being ' or ' Substance ' of earlier philosophies. Hegel's 
own statements, in dealing with this very subject of teleol- 
ogy, also weary us by their persistent harking back to the 
fundamental formula of the One and the Many or identity 
in difference. But it is not any whole or system, any many- 
in-one, as such, which is capable of being looked at philo- 
sophically as an End. Such phrases, unless we read into 
them a specific content from our own experience, suggest no 
more than fitting together the parts of some intellectual puz- 
zle. We have already seen, 2 in criticizing Mr. Bradley's and 
Professor Bosanquet's formulation of the principle of value, 
how both these writers are obliged in practice to supplement 
the purely logical criteria of inclusiveness and non-contra- 
diction by reference to ' the provinces of experience which 
comprise the various values of life ', 3 or, still more explicitly, 
to ' our main wants — for truth and life and for beauty and 
goodness '. 4 The importance of the idea of purpose and its 

1 Mr. Bradley's phrase. 

2 In Lecture XII, on ' The Criterion of Value '. 
8 Individuality and Value, p. 268. 

4 Appearance and Reality, p. 158. 



xvii CONATION AND VALUE 335 

correlate, satisfaction, is that they recall us to the aspects of 
feeling and will,' which are incontestable marks of any experi- 
ence known to us, and apart from which value is an unmean- 
ing phrase. Value in some theories is specially connected with 
the facts of feeling, but satisfaction means more than can be 
expressed in terms of pleasure and pain, considered merely 
as passive states of the soul. Satisfaction is inseparable 
from conation, and successful conation is the self -fulfilment 
of the creature. In its highest form, such conation means 
realized purpose, and the supreme values are those which 
represent the realization of our most sustained purposes and 
the satisfaction of our deepest and most permanent desires. 
Value, it is not too much to say, becomes an abstraction 
when dissociated from the idea of purpose and realization. 

But do not all these ideas bring us back, it may still be 
urged, to the region of finite effort? If purpose implies the 
ideas of conation and satisfaction, can we apply such a con- 
ception to reality as a whole without exposing ourselves to 
Spinoza's criticism that it implies defect in God, and explains 
his activity as a means to remove that defect, or to achieve 
a perfection which he previously did not possess? This 
fundamental difficulty is faced by Professor Bosanquet at 
the close of his contribution to an instructive Symposium on 
Purpose and Mechanism, 1 of a later date than his Gifford 
Lectures; and his suggestions towards a solution, if admit- 
tedly vague, seem to me, as coming from him, of unusual 
interest. In the Gifford volume, as we have seen, he appears, 
both at the outset and at the close, to reject the whole tele- 
ological point of view as applied to the Absolute. But in 
the lecture specifically devoted to the subject we find him 
acknowledging (or rather contending for) a 'teleology be- 
low consciousness ' and a ' teleology above finite conscious- 
ness \ ' Nature,' in short, ' below conscious intelligence and 
Providence, if we like to call it so, above, can achieve without 

1 Published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1911-12. 



336 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

the help of a relevant explicit consciousness, results of the 
same general type as those which are ascribed to the guidance 
of conscious minds.' 1 It is not, therefore, the purposiveness 
of the whole which he denies, but the ascription of that pur- 
posiveness exclusively to the conscious guidance of finite 
individuals or of a God individualistically and externally 
conceived. In the more recent discussion to which I have 
referred, he proposes, in order to make this position plainer, 
to use teleology as a third term distinct both from mechanism 
on the one hand and purpose on the other, purpose being now 
identified with what he had called in his lectures ' the tele- 
ology of finite consciousness \ ' Teleology ', he says in this 
symposium, ' as a character applicable to the universe, is got 
at primarily by freeing the idea of end from some incidents 
of finite purpose which cannot apply to a true whole.' But, 
he proceeds (and this is the point of interest to which I 
alluded), does teleology in this cosmic application ' transcend 
finite purpose in every way ? Or must not, as we anticipated 
at starting, some special characters of finite purpose be 
carried on into teleology and establish a kinship between the 
two ? In other words, are we not to unite the conative atti- 
tude and the correlative idea of satisfaction? Now, to unite 
conation with accomplished fruition — with the idea of a 
whole in which end and process are one — is not easy ; on the 
other hand, to separate perfection from value, and value 
from satisfaction, and satisfaction from a conative attitude, 
is also not easy.' ' The difficulty begins ', he adds, ' when 
you attempt to explain to whom the perfect whole is to be 
satisfactory ' ; and he is so impressed by this difficulty that 
he attempts to get round it by substituting the term satis- 
factoriness for satisfaction. ' I believe that value lies deeper, 
and is not conferred by de facto satisfying a conation, but is 
in satisfactoriness rather than satisfaction — in the character 
of completeness and positive non-contradiction which gives 

1 PP. 145, 153-4- 



xvii SATISFACTORY TO WHOM? 337 

the power to satisfy conations, because it belongs to what 
unites all reality in itself.' 

But surely this is an evasion of the difficulty, not a solu- 
tion; for why is anything called satisfactory, unless because 
it satisfies some one? The same question therefore arises — 
satisfactory to whom? The suggestion would seem to be 
that the satisfaction is experienced distributively by indi- 
vidual finite beings. And that is no doubt an element in 
the case, for, after all, it is we who pronounce those judge- 
ments of ultimate value, and apart from such human valua- 
tions we possess no magical access to the secrets of the 
Absolute. But it is precisely because, in such judgements, 
there is no question of the realization of any merely indi- 
vidual or selfish purpose, or of any number of finite purposes, 
that we are prepared to stake our all upon them. We 
should not experience the satisfaction, if we did not believe 
that we were judging sub specie universi or from the stand- 
point of the whole. Our finite judgements, therefore, seem 
to postulate a satisfaction of the Absolute itself, if I may 
so put it, which as heirs of reason and freemen of the 
universe we are capable of sharing. But in substituting 
satisfactoriness for satisfaction, and then translating satis- 
factoriness into purely logical characteristics, Professor 
Bosanquet seems to yield to the subtle temptation to 
detach the content and structure of truth, as logic does, 
from the concrete whole in which it is enjoyed, and to treat 
it as a self -existent entity. But the abstraction which is 
permissible and intelligible in logic or in any special science 
becomes meaningless in metaphysics. In an ultimate account 
of things, the logical criteria themselves — completeness, har- 
mony, coherence, any term we like to use — imply, as much 
as any ethical or aesthetical criterion, the reference to a 
conscious experience appreciative of value. Because it is 
purged of all private by-ends and selfish interests, we some- 
times think of truth as typically impersonal, but Aristotle's 



338 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

account of the divine felicity is sufficient to remind us that 
truth is not a logical abstraction but a supreme value. 

The point which interests me, however, is that, in the 
end, Professor Bosanquet refuses to surrender the idea of 
satisfaction which he had seemed inclined to give up on 
account of its difficulty. The sentence which I have criti- 
cized is not, in point of fact, consistent with what he imme- 
diately goes on to say : it seems to reflect a temporary dis- 
couragement. In the very next sentence he reiterates the 
conviction which gave rise to the difficulty. ' Yet ', he 
says, ' in the purposiveness which is perfect and inclusive 
satisfaction, something must remain which represents the 
facts of conation.' Or, as he puts it in the following sen- 
tence still more strikingly, ' the contradiction of a conation 
co-existing with fruition must be realized V ' This is not 
the place ', he adds, * to offer suggestions how this can be, 
but the singularly intimate unity which characterizes the 
teleological whole must be distinguished from the abstract 
unity of mechanism by something akin to a conation of all 
towards all, though its timeless unity seems a meeting of 
extremes with the mechanical ideal.' 

The realization of a contradiction is a strange phrase on 
Professor Bosanquet's lips, but the paradoxes or apparent 
contradictions of religious thought have often been remarked 
on. A recent writer 2 has observed in that connexion that, 
* at our level of thought, the inclusion of an element of con- 
tradiction seems to be a sign of reality and of largeness of 
view rather than of error '. The paradox of religion may be 
truer, in short, than the dilemma, the ' Either-or ', of the 
logical understanding. So it may be here in dealing with 

1 In the Appendix to Individuality and Value, in the immediate con- 
text of the statement that ' it seems unintelligible for the Absolute or 
for any perfect experience to be a will or purpose ', he adds, ' To say 
that the reality as a whole may contain an untold number of finite pur- 
poses, and must itself include a satisfaction in which purpose and ful- 
filment are one, is another thing '. 

2 W. H. Moberly in Foundations, p. 520. 



xvn SPINOZA'S DENIALS 339 

the conception of an absolute experience. It seems at least 
certain that if nothing remains in that experience to repre- 
sent the facts of conation and fruition, the Absolute is 
assimilated, as it is in Spinoza's formal theory, or as it some- 
times appears to be in Hegel, to a timeless system of abstract 
truth, or. as Professor Bosanquet here suggests, it becomes 
indistinguishable from ' the mechanical ideal '. If we return 
for a moment to consider what is true and what is false in 
Spinoza's denials, it may serve to illuminate our conclusion. 
He denies both intellectus and voluntas to God. But his 
fierce polemic against ' absoluta voluntas ' must be taken as 
his protest against transferring the idea of choice to a sphere 
where it is inapplicable, and thus founding the universe and 
its constitution upon a groundless act, upon the abstraction 
of contentless will. And this protest must be emphatically 
sustained. When he denies voluntas to God. it is this free- 
dom of choice which he means, and when he denies intellectus 
it is the schematic and partial knowledge of things from 
the outside, the knowledge which proceeds by the piecing 
together of parts and the inferring of the unknown from 
the known — intellect, the deviser of means towards ends, of 
plans of action for the satisfaction of wants — it is this 
characteristically finite procedure which he refuses to carry 
over into his conception of the divine nature or the divine 
activity. And again it is obvious that the refusal is just. 
And yet there is a danger in Spinoza's denials; for although 
the discursive and scheming intellect is rightly denied, intel- 
ligence in some larger, directer form — of which we may 
have hints and anticipations in our own experience — must 
be affirmed, if we are not to treat that which is highest 
as lower than ourselves, and to assimilate it to unconscious 
nature. And with intelligence goes will, not as a meaning- 
less freedom of choice but in the sense of continuously 
affirming and possessing one's experience, which is the 
characteristic, or at least the ideal, of the self-conscious 



340 TELEOLOGY AS COSMIC PRINCIPLE lect. 

individual. So far as Spinoza appears to deny these char- 
acteristics to his ultimate Individual, he abandons the prin- 
ciple of interpretation by the highest we know, and in that 
case, or so far as he does so, necessity, even the necessity 
of the divine nature, tends to suggest not the inwardly 
affirmed movement and rhythm of a concrete experience or 
life, but a kind of abstract destiny imposed on the universe. 
It is the idea of the divine necessity as a self-affirmed life, 
and not as a blind force acting within the universe like a 
fate which it undergoes, that constitutes the differentia 
between a theistic and a non-theistic doctrine. 

The terms we have just used, however, do not carry us, 
of themselves, beyond the contemplative felicity of Aris- 
totle's eternal thinker. But if we revise our idea of perfec- 
tion — if we keep in view the conclusion to which we were led 
in the two preceding lectures, and definitively abandon the 
conception of God as a changeless and self-sufficient unit — 
the movement to the finite and the realization of the infinite 
in the finite must be taken as the fundamental character 
of the divine life. And if so, what term could be devised 
more fitting to describe the relation of the time-world and 
its process to the divine totality than to speak of it as ' the 
eternal purpose' of God? Like every term of our mortal 
speech, it retains the associations of time. The End appears 
as a ' far-off divine event ', a consummation delayed; and 
beyond doubt the finite point of view cannot be transferred 
literally to an Absolute Experience. But so far as the 
ideas of process and ultimate achievement embody the con- 
ception of effort — nay, of difficulty — they may be accepted 
as truer to the great Fact of the universe than the language 
even of a philosopher like Hegel when he speaks of the 
Absolute Life as the eternal play of love with itself. 1 In 

1 Philosophy of Religion. I am, of course, well aware that at other 
times Hegel emphasizes the element of strain in the cosmos. Many 
passages might be quoted. 



xvii ACTIVITY AND PURPOSE 341 

short, if the finite world means anything to God, the ideas 
of activity and purpose are indispensable. If he is not 
himself active in the process, he is no more than the 
Eternal Dreamer, and the whole time-world becomes the 
illusion which many absolutist systems pronounce it to be. 
Founding, as I do, on the verities of the spiritual life, it 
would be waste of time for me, at the stage we have now 
reached, to combat such a view. But the relation of the 
temporal to the eternal is so old a metaphysical problem, and 
one so much in the foreground at present, that it demands 
consideration in a special lecture. 



LECTURE XVIII 

TIME AND ETERNITY 

It was the apparent inseparability of the idea of Purpose 
from the future or the ' not-yet ' that constituted the diffi- 
culty in applying it to the action of the Absolute or to the 
universe as a whole. We are thus led directly to a more 
general consideration of the problem of Time in its relation 
to the Absolute, or, as it is sometimes otherwise expressed, 
the question of the ultimate reality or unreality of Time. 
Adopting Plato's figure of the successive waves of a philo- 
sophic argument, we may well say that this is the most 
mountainous and formidable of the breakers we have to 
encounter. Greek speculation in any profounder sense may 
be said to have begun, in Heraclitus and Parmenides, with 
the problem of time and change ; and the same problem is 
the fundamental issue in the latest contemporary philoso- 
phies of Mr. Bradley and M. Bergson. ' Nothing perfect, 
nothing genuinely real, can move,' says Mr. Bradley, 1 utter- 
ing in one weighty Parmenidean phrase the burden and the 
underlying assumption of his whole philosophy; while dura- 
tion, as we know, is to M. Bergson, in his own words, ' the 
very stuff of reality \ a The persistence of the problem need 
not surprise us if, as Professor Royce says, 3 ' any rational 
decision as between a pessimistic and an optimistic view of 
the world, any account of the relation between God and 
Man, any view of the sense in which the evils and imperfec- 
tions of the universe can be comprehended or justified, in 

1 Appearance and Reality, p. 500. So again, p. 270, ' In any case there 
is no history or progress in the Absolute '. 

2 Creative Evolution, p. 287. 

3 The World and the Individual, vol. ii, p. 112. 



xvm THREE SENSES OF ETERNITY 343 

brief, any philosophical reconciliation with religion and life. 
must turn in part upon a distinction between the Temporal 
and the Eternal, and upon an insight into their unity in 
the midst of their contrast \ ' A philosophical position \ 
says Professor Bosanquet in the same spirit, ' is definitely 
characterized by the attitude adopted to the course of 
time/' x 

Nothing is perhaps more remarkable, if we consider the 
intimacy and the omnipresence of the experience of change. 
than the general refusal of speculative and. it may be added, 
of religious thought, to regard this universal characteristic 
of human experience as an ultimate predicate of reality. 
The phenomenon is all the stranger seeing that, from the 
nature of the situation, it is impossible for us to emancipate 
ourselves from the temporal way of thinking and speaking: 
and, consequently, despite our best endeavours, we can 
only describe the supposed timeless or eternal reality by 
analogies and metaphors borrowed from our time-experi- 
ence. 

In the latest philosophical encyclopaedia the article 
1 Eternity ' 2 distinguishes three main senses in which the 
term is employed : ( 1 ) to denote an unending extent of time. 
(2) to denote that which is essentially timeless, and (3) to 
denote that which includes time but somehow transcends it. 3 
The first is the popular idea, taking its stand on the ordinary 
conception of time without trying to transform it in any 
way. but simply extending it quantitatively — adding more 
time at both ends. The helplessness with which this end- 
less progress and regress afflicts the mind, the contradictions 
in which it involves us, if it is offered as a final statement 

1 J'aluc and Destiny of the Individual, p. 291. 

2 By Professor T. S. Mackenzie in Dr. Hastings's Encyclopaedia of 
Religion and Ethics. 

3 Similarly, Dr. McTaggart notes ' three distinct senses : to denote 
unending time, to denote the timelessness of truths, and to denote the 
timelessness of existences ' (in an article on ' The Relation of Time and 
Eternity", Mind. X. S.. vol. xviii. p. 343"). 



344 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

of the nature of existence, have led many philosophers to 
insist on the essentially timeless nature of reality. They 
speak as if the time-view of the world were a pure illusion, 
embodying no characteristic feature of the universe, and 
therefore simply to be set aside in any attempt at an ulti- 
mate statement. But although this may be a natural revul- 
sion from the popular conception, it is, I propose to argue, 
an over-statement, which is entirely contrary to sound prin- 
ciples of interpretation, and which necessarily lands us in 
a false position. The eternal is not timeless in the sense 
in which we might say that moral qualities are not spatial 
magnitudes; the eternal and the temporal are essentially 
correlative conceptions, so that it is only through the char- 
acteristic features of time — through some transformation 
of these features — that we can form any intelligible con- 
ception of the eternal. That is the principle of interpreta- 
tion which we have followed throughout. Appearances are 
our only clue to the nature of reality. It is in developing 
what we find there, not in passing away from it and con- 
demning it as illusion, that we may hope to form some 
conception of an absolute or perfect life. If we adopt the 
other method, we pass, of necessity, into the region of the 
completely unknown, where we can only speak in negatives. 
The third sense of the term mentioned by the writer of the 
article seems therefore the direction in which we should 
look for a solution of our difficulties. 

The second sense, absolute timelessness, to which perhaps 
the term timeless might be most fitly restricted, covers the 
timelessness which is commonly said to belong to truths, 
or laws, or a conceptual system. The knowledge of any 
truth is, of course, an event in time; it is part of the history 
of some mind. Or, if the contemplation of a system of 
truths is supposed to be the occupation in which a divine 
mind realizes its eternal felicity, this activity of contempla- 
tion may still be distinguished, as a mode of existence, from 



xvm TIMELESSNESS OF TRUTH 345 

the content of truth contemplated. The timelessness of 
truth as a logical content was the discovery of Plato. It 
is the profound thought which inspires his theory of the 
changeless world of Ideas, the world of true Being, as con- 
trasted with the world of things and events, the world of 
yiveeiSoY Becoming. 'The conceptions through which we 
think things have no part in the mutability which we attrib- 
ute on account of their changes to the things of which the 
qualities are the predicates.' x A sweet thing may become 
sour, or a white thing may become black, but sweetness does 
not become sourness or whiteness blackness. Every concept 
is a meaning timelessly identical with itself and timelessly 
related, by relations of contrast or resemblance or otherwise, 
to other concepts in the world of knowledge. Here, then, 
we have a world of meanings, related or interconnected with 
one another, possessing a kind of reality, different from the 
reality which we attribute to an existent thing or to an 
event that happens, but still a reality which we instinctively 
acknowledge, for ' we all feel certain in the moment in 
which we think any truth that we have not created it for 
the first time, but merely recognized it; it was valid before 
we thought of it, and will continue so without regard to 
any existence of whatever kind \ It matters not whether 
it is ever exemplified in the structure of the actual world or 
is ever realized in the thought of a mind. 

This kind of reality modern philosophy would designate, 
as Lotze says, by the term validity. The truths, we say, 
are valid, they hold good, and, as entirely independent of 
time, we say they are timelessly or eternally valid. They 
do not belong to the world of things and events; they do 
not belong to what we ordinarily call the real world at all. 
Yet the kind of reality which they possess is so striking 
especially on its first discovery, that we can sympathetically 

1 I utilize here and throughout this paragraph Lotze's excellent 
account of this ideal world in his Logic, Part III, chap. ii. 



346 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

understand Plato's descriptions of the world of the Ideas 
as the world of true reality, in contrast with the world of 
things subject to change. For the changing things seem to 
possess any definite reality only so far as they are clothed 
with one or more of these eternal predicates — in Platonic 
phrase, so far as they participate in the Ideas. It may well 
be, as Lotze suggests, that Plato's description of the Ideas 
as possessing no local habitation, as visible only to the 
mind, as a world of pure intelligence, a heaven beyond the 
heavens, and many other glowing metaphors, were intended 
to guard against that very hypostatization of the Ideas as 
actual existences or substances which became the traditional 
interpretation of Plato's theory. But besides the dangerous 
influence of poetic metaphor upon more prosaic minds, it 
must be remembered that Plato had only the one term 
Being (pvaia or rd ov) to express reality of whatever sort. 
It was almost inevitable, therefore, that the two kinds of 
reality should be assimilated — that the Ideas should have 
an existential status conferred on them, and on the other 
hand that the reality at the foundation of the existent world 
should be conceived after the fashion of the timeless validity 
of truths. Whatever his intention may have been, this, as 
a matter of history, was Plato's legacy to philosophical 
thought; and M. Bergson is right in pointing out that, in 
spite of Aristotle's polemic against Plato's substantiation 
of the Ideas, his own doctrine of God as a Being apart 
from the process of the world, defined as a thinking upon 
thought, is simply Plato's Ideas ' pressed into each other 
and rolled up into a ball '. * The Aristotelian God is the 
Idea of Ideas or the synthesis of all concepts in a single 
concept ', and the eternal divine thinking is conceived 
entirely on the analogy of a timeless system of abstract 
conceptions. 1 

As moderns, we may probably best understand the time- 
1 Creative Evolution, p. 339 (English translation). 



xvni THE PLATONIC IDEAS 347 

lessness which belongs to the notion of meaning or validity 
by thinking, not of concepts or Ideas, but of truths or laws. 
We naturally go for our examples to what are often called 
necessary truths — the laws of logic or mathematics — which, 
although suggested by observed facts, are recognized as in 
no way dependent on such observations. But the induc- 
tively established laws of the physical and other sciences, 
if true at all, are timeless truths on exactly the same foot- 
ing. And it may be said that the same holds good of any 
proposition whatsoever. It may be only a statement about 
a particular event, but ' once true, always true '. Thus, 
as Locke says, ' Seeing water at this instant, it is an 
unquestionable truth to me that water doth exist; and 
remembering that I saw it yesterday, it will be always true 
that water did exist July 10, 1688, as it will also be equally 
true that a certain number of very fine colours did exist, 
which at the same time I saw upon a bottle of that water '. 
But clearly timelessness in this sense is not calculated to 
throw light on what may be meant by eternity, as predicated 
of any concrete experience, and, as we have already seen 
in another connexion, it was just because Green's theory 
of an eternal consciousness, based as it was on the logical 
analysis of knowledge, tended to treat that consciousness 
as simply the logical unity of the subject involved in every 
judgement, or as the ideal focus of a system of intelligible 
relations, that we found it impossible to accept this abstract 
principle of unity as an eternal or divine Self operative in 
our individual experience. The timelessness of the subject, 
in Green's theory, is the abstract timelessness of the system 
of relations of which it is, as he says, the ' medium and 
sustainer \ If, therefore, we were free to fix our own ter- 
minology, it would, as I have already suggested, be better 
to restrict the predicate timeless to the world of truth as 
logic conceives it, and, in speaking of the concretely real, 
to employ the opposed but, as it may perhaps be shown, 



348 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

essentially correlative conceptions of the temporal and the 
eternal. 

The original meaning of the eternal is, of course, not 
that of the timeless, but that which lasts or endures through 
time. In the grand old English word, it is the everlasting; 
or, in the Latin phrase, it is the permanent, that which 
' remains ' while other things ' change and pass '. Eternal, 
aeviternus, is, by etymology, age-long. And, popularly, all 
these terms are originally applied, not in the strict sense of 
lasting through all time, but in a superlative and honorific 
sense, as compared with human measures by years and gen- 
erations. So we read of ' the everlasting hills ' ; and the 
old phrase seems not out of place, although we know that 
they are subject to a perpetual transformation through 
nature's agencies of frost and sun and rain. 

The hills are shadows and they flow 

From form to form, and nothing stands ; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands, 

Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 

But whether lasting an immensely long time, or being 
literally without beginning or end, our original conception 
of the eternal plainly has its roots in our temporal experi- 
ence. Yet when we look more closely, it is equally plain 
that the meaning of the term is not exhausted — in fact 
does not primarily consist — in the idea of mere continuance 
or the indefinite prolongation of existence. Such a merely 
quantitative eternity adds nothing of worth or dignity to 
the thing in question. It belongs by hypothesis to the 
physical elements, and it might belong to the most casual 
and indifferent of their combinations. But the term eternal 
and its equivalents are charged with emotional value; and 
if we consult the language of religion in order to discover 
the source of that value, we find that what is expressed is the 
indestructible confidence of the worshipper in the perma- 



xvm ' ETERNAL ' IN ORDINARY USAGE 349 

nence of the divine character and in the constancy of the 
divine purpose of righteousness as revealed in the govern- 
ment of the world. God is ' the Father of lights, with whom 
is no variableness, neither shadow of turning'; it is his 
righteousness, his truth, and above all, his mercy, which 
1 endureth for ever '. This is the ' living will ' x which binds 
past and future together in the unity of a single omnipotent 
purpose, and which therefore in a sense transcends such dis- 
tinctions. The generations arise and pass away — all flesh is 
as grass — ' but the word of the Lord endureth for ever '. 
And even when the term is applied to physical objects, as to 
the hills, it is not, I think, the idea of passive continuance 
which we wish to express, so much as the feeling they in- 
spire of steadfast power to resist the disintegrating agencies 
of the seasons and the years. 

Such being the original associations of the term, an 
analysis of our actual time-experience may probably help 
us towards a truer view of the antithesis we are considering. 
Many, perhaps most, arguments on the subject are based 
on the conception of absolute or mathematical time. Now, 
mathematical time — * duration in itself ', as Locke called 
it — is ' considered as going on in one constant equal uniform 
course '. It is, in fact, the abstraction of mere succession — a 
system of positions in which we can arrange events as before 
or after one another. This pauseless flow is conceived as a 
succession of instants ; but the mathematical instant has itself 
no duration, just as the mathematical point of the geometer 
is commonly defined as possessing no spatial magnitude. 
Both are ideal or limiting conceptions : ' philosophers ', Reid 
tells us, ' give the name of the present to that indivisible 
point of time which divides the future from the past \ But 
just as it is impossible to regard the line or the surface as 

1 O living will, that shalt endure 

When all that seems shall suffer shock. 

In Memoriam, cxxxi. 






350 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

a sum of such points, so it is impossible to construct the 
consciousness of real time out of the succession of such 
timeless units. In fact, if we follow out the conception to 
its logical results, the present, which we otherwise think 
of as ' the living present ', interposed between a past which 
no longer exists and a future whose existence has not yet 
begun, is itself deprived of factual reality, and the whole 
real content of experience disappears. 

Our past is clean forgot, 
Our present is and is not, 
Our future 's a sealed seed-plot, 
And what betwixt them are we ? x 

The older psychology did, in point of fact, endeavour 
to derive our consciousness of time or duration from the 
succession of ideas or mental states, regarded as discrete 
events, no one of which possesses duration in itself. Thus 
Locke tells us that, if it were possible for a waking man to 
keep only one idea in his mind without variation and the 
succession of others, the perception of duration would be 
' quite lost to him ', as much so as it is in sound sleep ; 
though, with characteristic honesty, he returns to tell us 
that in point of fact, he does not himself think this feat 
is possible. 2 Reid has no difficulty in demonstrating the 
impossibility of deriving a consciousness of duration from 
the succession of non-durational units. If, as Locke seems 
to say, it is the intervals between the ideas which yield us 
the consciousness, 3 then the intervals between the first 
idea and the second and the intervals between any two 
subsequent ideas (although, according to the hypothesis, 
no succession of ideas takes place in such an interval) must 

1 D. G. Rossetti, 'The Cloud Confines'. 
2 Essay, II. 14. 4 and 13. 

8 ' The distance between any parts of that succession, or between the 
appearance of any two ideas in our minds, is what we call duration.' 



xviii DURATION AND SUCCESSION 351 

each of them possess duration for the mind. Otherwise we 
should be asked to believe that the multiplication of nothing 
may produce a definite quantity. ' I conclude, therefore/ 
he says, ' that there must be duration in every single interval 
or element of which the whole duration is made up. Noth- 
ing, indeed, is more certain than that every elementary part 
of duration must have duration, as every elementary part of 
extension must have extension. . . . We may measure dura- 
tion by the succession of thoughts in the mind, as we 
measure length by inches or feet; but the notion or idea 
of duration must be antecedent to the mensuration of it, as 
the notion of length is antecedent to its being measured.' 1 
But Reid appears still to cling to the idea of a succession 
of non-durational units, separated from one another by 
blocks of duration in which no events take place and in 
which, therefore, no succession is perceived. In other 
words, our experience is treated as consisting of discrete 
units of content (perceptions or ideas) separated from one 
another by periods of completely empty time. But empty 
time — a time in which nothing happens — is a conceptual 

1 Essays on the Intellectual Powers, Essay III, chap. v. In spite of 
this excellent conclusion, Reid's own doctrine is. not entirely free from 
the confusion which he censures, for he still treats our perceptions (as 
well as what Locke calls ideas of reflection) as momentary in the mathe- 
matical sense. He concludes, accordingly, that, ' if we speak strictly and 
philosophically, no kind of succession can be an object either of the 
senses or of consciousness [i. e. Locke's reflection] ; because the opera- 
tions of both are confined to the present point of time, and there can be 
no succession in a point of time. . . . Hence it is easy to see that, though 
in common language we speak with perfect propriety and truth when we 
say that we see a body move and that motion is an object of sense, yet 
when, as philosophers, we distinguish accurately the province of sense 
from that of memory, we can no more see what is past, though but a 
moment ago, than we can remember what is present ; so that, speaking 
philosophically, it is only by the aid of memory that we discern motion 
or any succession whatever. We see the present place of the body, we 
remember the successive advance it made to that place ; the first can then 
only give us a conception of motion when joined to the last.' Cf. per 
contra, Mr. Wildon Carr's masterly treatment of this very phenomenon, 
' the sensation of movement ', in his address to the Aristotelian Society 
on ' The Moment of Experience ', Proceedings, 1915-16. 



352 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

abstraction which has no place in real experience. Form 
without matter nowhere exists. A completely empty time 
would be simply equivalent to the suspension or stand- 
still of time. Our actual consciousness of time and its lapse 
is entirely dependent on the continual change of the experi- 
enced content. And the content, though parts of it are 
punctuated by a more vivid interest, is not to be conceived 
as a series of illuminated points from one to another of 
which we stride, so to speak, across an interval of darkness. 
The content is a moving and gradually changing whole. 
The change is in the strictest sense ceaseless and continu- 
ous — a continuous flow or melting of one moment into the 
next. This movement, of which we are directly conscious 
in its progress, constitutes the concrete reality of time — the 
ditree reelle which M. Bergson so impressively expounds. 
* Duration ', as he vividly puts it, ' is the continuous prog- 
ress of the past which gnaws into the future and which 
swells as it advances.' * And, as he goes on to argue, time 
as it thus reveals itself in experience, is the very essence of 
life and of self-conscious existence. 

The continuous and * overlapping ' character of conscious 
experience, as well as our direct apprehension of the tem- 
poral relations involved, is emphasized by recent psychology 
in its doctrine of ' the specious present ' or the ' span ' of 
consciousness. William James's statement of the doctrine 
in his Principles of Psychology is probably the best known, 
but within the last few months the position has been very 
ably re-stated and defended by Mr. Wildon Carr in his 
paper on ' The Moment of Experience '. ' The practically 
cognized present ', says James, ' is no knife-edge, but a 
saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which 
we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions 
into time. The unit of composition of our perception of 
time is a duration, with a bow and stern, as it were — a rear- 
1 Creative Evolution, p. 5. 



xvm THE SPECIOUS PRESENT 353 

ward and a forward-looking end. It is only as parts of this 
duration-block that the relation of succession of one end to 
the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and 
then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the 
succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem 
to feel the interval of time as a whole with its two ends 
imbedded in it.' 1 ' The content of the duration thus steadily 
perceived is in a constant flux, events dawning into its 
forward end as fast as they fade out of its rearward one, 
and each of them changing its time-coefficient from " not- 
yet " or " not-quite-yet " to " just-gone " or " gone " as it 
passes by. Meanwhile the specious present, the intuited 
duration, stands permanent, like the rainbow on the water- 
fall, with its own quality unchanged by the events that 
stream through it. Each of these, as it slips out, retains 
the power of being reproduced. Please observe, however, 
that the reproduction of an event, after it has once com- 
pletely dropped out of the rearward end of the specious 
present, is an entirely different psychic fact from its direct 
perception in the specious present as a thing immediately 
past. A creature might be entirely devoid of reproductive 
memory, and yet have the time-sense; but the latter would 
be limited, in his case, to the few seconds immediately 
passing by.' 2 

1 Principles of Psychology, vol. i, pp. 609-10. 

2 Ibid., pp. 630-1. Similarly, Mr. Carr, dealing with our perception of 
the luminous line described by a falling star, repudiates the explanation 
of the line as a fusion of quite recent memory-images with the actual 
sensation of a luminous point. ' By every criterion of sensation the line 
is sense, not memorized. The whole series is within the moment of 
experience and therefore a present sensation. A point or instant is not 
past because it is before another which is present, nor is it present only 
when the preceding member of the series is not present. It is present 
while it remains within the moment of experience. . . . The moment of 
experience has within it no distinction of past and present, but it has 
within it the distinction of before and after. The limit of its duration 
is where memory takes the place of sensation.' I would refer also to 
Professor McGilvary's article on ' Time and the Experience of Time ' in 
the Philosophical Review, March, 1914. 



354 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

Our primitive and basal experience of time is thus charac- 
terized by a togetherness of parts or elements which lifts us 
above the aspect of mere succession, exclusively emphasized 
in the older accounts : as when Locke describes duration as 
' perishing distance, of which no two parts exist together, 
but follow each other in succession V In contrast with 
temporal experience, conceived as pure succession, the- 
ologians have described the nature of the divine knowledge 
as a totum simul, an intuition in which the human distinc- 
tions of past and future disappear in an eternal present. But 
if this is to be accepted as an indication of the meaning of 
eternity, it is clear from what has been said of the real 
nature of our time-consciousness that the contrast between 
human and divine knowledge is not a sheer or absolute 
contrast between the mere successiveness of mutually exclu- 
sive moments and the compresence of all these moments 
in a single experience. For it cannot be too strongly empha- 
sized that the experience of succession itself would be impos- 
sible if the successive items were not directly apprehended 
together as stages of a single process, parts within a single 
whole of duration. In the compresence which is thus an 
essential feature of our consciousness of time we therefore 
already realize, though doubtless on an infinitesimal scale, 
the nature of an eternal consciousness. ' In principle,' as 
Professor Royce says, * we already possess and are 
acquainted with the nature of such a consciousness, when- 
ever we do experience any succession as one whole.' 2 And 
the principle is not affected by the narrow limits of our 
human span. ' A thousand years in thy sight are but as yes- 
terday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.' It is 
possible, on the basis of our own experience, to imagine a 
consciousness to which the whole content of time is known 
at once in the same way in which a finite being knows the 
specious present. 

1 Essay, II. 15. 12. 2 The World and the Individual, vol. ii, p. 142. 



xvin THE ETERNAL AS A TOTUM SIMUL 355 

Professor Royce has laid great stress on this similarity of 
structure — this anticipation, as it may be termed, of the 
eternal in the temporal. And sometimes he seems to say 
that the difference between the two modes of consciousness 
consists simply in their difference of span. ' The eternal 
insight ', we read for example, ' observes the whole of time 
and all that happens therein, and is eternal only by virtue of 
the fact that it does know the whole of time.' * But it is 
clear that if the totum sitnul means no more than this, it is 
not enough. We clearly do not mean by an eternal con- 
sciousness one which simply contemplates the world as a 
series of events, but is somehow able to include the whole 
series in its span. Such a consciousness could not be said in 
any important sense to transcend time ; for, regarded simply 
as events that happen, the perceived content possesses no 
internal unity which would permit of its being grasped as 
a whole. The very defect of the temporal order, as merely 
temporal, is the inherent absence of unity and totality — the 
completely inorganic level at which its contents remain ; and 
in an eternal consciousness this defect is supposed to be 
corrected or overcome. But a consciousness which is merely 
a totum simul would be no better than an epiphenomenon 
or accompaniment of the endless succession. Or, as Pro- 
fessor Bosanquet puts it, we should have ' only a fixed 
panorama of exactly the same occurrences which form a 
diorama for the man who goes through them \ 2 The real 
intention of Professor Royce's argument must be gathered, 
therefore, from the alternative wording he more usually 
employs — to know the process ' as a whole ' — and by the 
illustration, to which he constantly recurs, of the musical 
phrase or melody. For here we are dealing, not simply with 

1 Ibid., p. 144. 

2 Individuality and Value, p. 388 (Appendix). Cf. Taylor, Elements 
of Metaphysics, p. 264 : ' The direct insight of the Absolute Experience 
into its own internal meaning or structure cannot be adequately thought 
of as mere simultaneous awareness of the detail of existence.' 



356 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

a longer or shorter succession of sounds, but with a series 
which is significant and in a proper sense a whole; and 
although the successive order is an essential factor in the 
result, the consciousness of the melody as an aesthetic fact, 
or, for the matter of that, the perception of the meaning of 
any sentence, is an immediate perception different in kind 
from that in which we contemplate a series of events. The 
notes of the melody succeed one another in time, and the 
sentence is resolvable into separate words, and these again 
into syllables, no one of which co-exists, as a physical fact, 
with any other. Yet it is, in truth, only subsequent reflection 
of a scientific kind which, abstracting from the intellectual or 
musical meaning, enables us to isolate the elementary con- 
stituent sounds as successive events, occupying each its 
exclusive moment of conceptual or physical time. In the 
consciousness of such a significant whole, therefore, we 
have an example of a consciousness which may be called 
eternal, not in the sense of a maximized consciousness of 
time, but as an apprehension different in type, in which 
the temporal facts appear simply as the vehicle of a meaning 
or value. 

Moreover, it is only fair to remember that the epiphenom- 
enal or purely ' spectator ' theory entirely misrepresents the 
nature even of finite consciousness. No consciousness falls 
asunder into a series of events that simply pass in time, any 
more than time itself can be resolved into a series of discrete 
or mutually exclusive instants. Past, present, and future are 
not to be conceived as separate sections of a line, or as if they 
were lengths cut off an unwinding ribbon, related to one 
another merely as different and mutually exclusive sections 
of an impersonal sequence. Time is not an element in which 
consciousness passes, or a procession which passes before 
consciousness; it is simply the abstract form of the living 
movement which constitutes the reality of conscious life. If 
there is anything that a sound psychology teaches us, it is 



xviii ACTIVE BASIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 357 

the essentially conative structure of that life. And in cona- 
tion or active striving, past, present, and future are organi- 
cally related to one another in the unity of a single experience. 
Activity, as I am now using the term, is the characteristic 
of the living and the conscious being alone ; any application 
of the term, or any transference of its associations, to the 
happenings of physical nature and the causal relations be- 
tween one phenomenon and another is rightly branded as 
anthropomorphism. In the older psychology (as well as in 
some more recently fashionable psychologies) physics may 
be said to have revenged itself for this intrusion ; for in these 
systems our mental experience is constructed out of the in- 
terplay of static entities, called sensations, percepts, images, 
etc., conceived as the ' objects ' of a consciousness which is 
simply an eye beholding their evolutions. The temptation 
so to conceive the mental life is naturally strongest in 
dealing with perspective or specifically intellectual proc- 
esses; but to yield to it is to forget that, regarded thus 
statically, these facts or objects are only convenient abstrac- 
tions from a concrete process which has its active basis in 
the facts of interest and attention. Mental experience is, 
in every phase of it, a process; and that process is not an 
impersonal movement or flow, but a movement towards an 
end of some sort. The facts of life and of mind cannot be 
truly described, in short, except teleologically, that is to say, 
as activity directed towards some end. To speak of end or 
purpose is to employ too developed and too complex terms, 
if we are supposed to intend by them an object of desire 
clearly conceived and deliberately pursued. The end may 
be in the creature rather than consciously present to it. 
Hence conation — a term wide enough to include a striving 
which may be almost blind — is possibly better adapted even 
than the term activity to express what is meant, viz. that at 
every point the process of consciousness is interpretable as 
a self-directed movement towards some end, and can be 



358 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

intelligibly interpreted in no other way. Time and its direc- 
tion are, as it were, the transcript of this movement; in it 
they acquire a concrete significance. The future towards 
which man's face is set is primarily the end towards which 
he strives, but which is not yet within his grasp. As soon 
as it is grasped or enjoyed, it becomes the starting-point of 
a new pursuit and so recedes into the past. The words of 
the Apostle describing his own attitude of moral endeavour 
are, in fact, an apt description of this universal aspect of 
human experience — ' forgetting those things which are be- 
hind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before \ 

The consideration of Time has thus brought us back to the 
idea of Purpose or End, and it will be remembered that it 
was precisely the difficulties connected with that idea, as 
an ultimate category of explanation, that led to our present 
analysis. I cannot but think that the compass we have thus 
fetched carries with it an instructive moral. Purpose was 
condemned as essentially a temporal category. This is true, 
but the relation of the two terms is now reversed, for pur- 
posive activity is seen to be the concrete reality of which 
time is merely the abstract form. Time is the abstraction of 
unachieved purpose or of purpose on the way to achieve- 
ment. Now, if this is so, it seems certain that an intelligible 
meaning of eternity will be found, not by abandoning the 
idea of purpose, but by following it out. The eternal view of 
a time-process is not the view of all its stages simultaneously, 
but the view of them as elements or members of a completed 
purpose. Then only can we be said to see them ' as a whole \ 

As we have so often had occasion to observe, this tran- 
scendence of mere succession is exemplified in every appli- 
cation of the idea of growth or development. The impossi- 
bility which we experience of explaining later phases of such 
a process exhaustively by reference to the earlier is a proof 
that there is more in the process than appears at any given 
stage. The burden of our first series of lectures may be said 



xvm ELEMENTS IN A PURPOSE 359 

to have been the exposure of the so-called scientific explana- 
tion, which seek the whole cause of a complex effect in cer- 
tain simpler temporal antecedents, and, by pursuing this 
illusory quest from stage to stage, eventually arrives at the 
physical scheme of moving particles as the reality of the 
universe. We feel that such an analysis offers no explana- 
tion of what was the very point to be explained, the differ- 
ence between one stage and another, the growth in richness 
and complexity, the increment of being, so to speak, as we 
pass from the lower to the higher. And that is why we pass 
from the mechanical to the teleological mode of explanation. 
In so doing we may be said to supplement the causality of 
the past by the causality of the future, explaining the evolv- 
ing subject not only by what it has been, but, still more vitally, 
by what it is not yet, but is on its way to become. This we 
call the Idea or the End realized in the process. The nature 
of the Idea or End is, of course, only gradually disclosed in 
the course of the process, and can be fully or positively 
known only at its conclusion ; so that it does not enable us, in 
the case of a subject still evolving, to predict the nature of 
the future stages. It was, in fact, just the unpredictableness 
of the later stages from the standpoint of the earlier that 
drove us to this teleological mode of explanation. We are 
wise, as it were, after the event; and from the standpoint of 
the later stage we think of the earlier as containing in itself 
the potentiality of all that actually followed upon it, although 
no analysis of the earlier by itself is capable of making the 
presence of the later in the earlier palpable to us. 

But to think of the End as performed or prefigured in the 
beginning, and to think of it as operative while still an 
unrealized idea in the future, are both unsatisfactory modes 
of statement due to our human position in m edits rebus, 
in the middle of an uncompleted process. The fact with 
which we are faced is the breakdown of causal explana- 
tion through the antecedent in time. But to bring in the 



3.6o TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

future, as teleology seems to do, to make good the defects of 
the past, is really an imperfect way of saying that we are 
dealing with a systematic whole, and that the complete 
explanation, or, in the technical language of logic, the ground 
of any phenomenon is to be found only in the nature of that 
system or whole. As Professor Taylor well puts it, ' The 
succession of stages is welded into a unity by the singleness 
of the plan or law which they embody. The series of suc- 
cessive states which make up the history of a thing are the 
expression of the thing's nature or structure. To understand 
the thing's structure is to possess the key to the succession 
of its states. ... It is evident that in proportion as our 
knowledge of any thing or system of things approaches this 
insight into the laws of its structure, the processes of change 
acquire a new meaning for us. They lose their appearance 
of paradox and tend to become the self-evident expression of 
the identity which is their underlying principle. Change, 
once reduced to law and apprehended as the embodiment in 
succession of a principle we can understand, is no longer 
change as an unintelligible mystery.' 1 

But if time may be said to be thus transcended in the idea 
of a teleological process as an organic whole, words like 
' law ' or ' plan ', ' structure ' or ' system ', must not mislead 
us into thinking of the whole as timeless in the sense which 
we began by discarding, that is to say, as an abstract logical 
content. This sense, we decided, could have no meaning as 
applied to reality, for reality must be an experience not a 
theorem. As the Eleatic Stranger exclaims in the Sophist, 
when brought face to face with the blank eternity of the 
concept, ' Can we ever be made to believe that motion and 
life and soul and mind are not present in absolute Being? 
Can we imagine Being to be devoid of life and mind, and to 
remain a venerable, holy, mindless, unmoving fixture ? ' 2 
Movement, activity, process, is for us the very differentia of 
1 Elements of Metaphysics, pp. 162-3. 2 Sophist, 249. 



xvm ANALOGY OF AN ARTISTIC WHOLE 361 

concrete reality from the abstractions of science or of logic; 
and therefore, so far as this involves time, time must be 
retained in any conception we can form of an Absolute 
Experience. The ' eternal act ' by which the universe subsists 
can only be thought of by us as process continually renewed ; 
and although, to the synoptic view, the end cannot be sepa- 
rated from the beginning, as it is to the finite individual 
within the process, the type of experience suggested is not 
one in which the stages are viewed side by side as in a fixed 
picture, but one in which the whole is felt in every part, and 
every part is real as an element in the whole. 

Hence it is, I think, that the analogy of a work of art — a 
great drama or story — often seems to bring us nearest to 
what we feel must be the truth. For here, too, there is no 
such thing as a detached event, a mere present. In a great 
tragedy everything that happens is organic to the whole; 
the action which passes on the stage at any moment depends 
for its significance on all that has gone before, and we fore- 
feel in it the future issues which are being decided. When 
we read or witness a play for the first time, and the course 
of the action is unknown to us, this sense of the solidarity 
of the whole, the prescience of an immanent destiny working 
itself out in individual scenes — in a word or a glance — natur- 
ally grows as we proceed, and reaches its maximum of 
intensity as we approach the close. The infinite pathos of 
Othello is all uttered in the parting cry, ' No way but this '. 
But in the case of Greek tragedy, where the legendary basis 
was familiar to the spectators, or in the case of any modern 
masterpiece where the end and the outline of the plot are 
known to us beforehand, this perception of the meaning of 
the whole as articulated in the individual incidents is present 
to the reader or the spectator of the piece from the very out- 
set. And the same thing is true when we hear the opening 
chords of a well-known symphony; we hear them not as 
single chords but as elements in a great musical structure, 



362 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

prophetic, as it were, of all the thought and emotion that is 
to follow. The former case, where the End is gradually 
disclosed to us — divined by us — as we proceed, represents 
our human, finite attitude towards the future; the second, 
which may be supposed to reproduce that of the original 
poet or composer, is perhaps the nearest analogue we have 
to the divine apprehension of the temporal. What is com- 
mon to both is the perception of the meaning as resident in 
the whole, and the impossibility, therefore, of taking any 
stage by itself, even the last. In reading the last scene of 
a tragedy, or as we move towards the close of some great 
poem, we feel perhaps more profoundly than in any other 
way the truth of Hegel's well-known saying that the End is 
not something that can exist, or can be understood, by itself. 
For art, as for philosophy, the End is inseparable from the 
process of its accomplishment. The End is not the final 
stage which succeeds and supplants its predecessors; it is 
the meaning or spirit of the whole, distilled, as it were, into 
each individual scene or passage. 

The same principle applies to the history of a life. To 
take it as ' pure history ' is to rob it of all significance. We 
involuntarily regard it as the unfolding of a specific nature, 
the moulding of a mind and character in the play of circum- 
stance or the stress of passion. We regard it, in the phrase 
so often used already, as the making of a soul. The external 
observer can but dimly apprehend the stages and the factors 
in the drama, his interest and his insight being alike super- 
ficial ; but even he can appreciate to some extent the quality 
of the product. Oftenest, perhaps, under the transfiguring 
touch of death, does the informing spirit of a beloved life — 
its ' idea ', as Shakespeare calls it x — stand revealed, lighting 
up the significance of individual acts or sayings, half-for- 

1 The reference is to the beautiful lines in Much Ado about Nothing 
(Act iv, sc. i) : 

The idea of her life shall sweetly creep 
Into his study of imagination ; 



xvm THE ' IDEA ' OF A LIFE 363 

gotten, as glimpses of a single soul. So, but far more inti- 
mately, we may conceive a human mind and life to be 
realized as a divine idea or an individual purpose in the 
Absolute. Far more intimately, for to the tenderest finite 
sympathy the ' idea ' must retain much of the abstractness 
of a construction from the outside ; but whatever independ- 
ence of will we may attribute to the creature, we cannot 
think of him, in relation to the creative and informing Spirit, 
as dwelling in an inaccessible sphere of his own. * All things 
are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we 
have to do.' The divine idea of ' a mind and life ' 1 would 
therefore be the very life itself, experienced as significant 
because experienced as a whole, and, what is more, as part 
of the meaning of the all-inclusive whole. 

Somewhat in this fashion we may perhaps conceive that 
the time-process is retained in the Absolute and yet tran- 
scended. Retained in some form it must be, if our life ex- 
perience is not to be deprived of all meaning and value. The 
temporal process is not simply non-existent from the Abso- 
lute point of view ; it is not a mere illusion, any more than 
the existence of the finite world, of which, indeed, it is the 
characteristic form and expression. I have urged consist- 
ently in these later lectures that the existence of that world 
must represent a necessity of the divine nature and must 
possess a value for the divine experience. Hence the time- 
process must enter somehow into that experience. 

It may be objected that, in the view suggested, time really 
vanishes altogether in the Absolute. The characteristic fea- 
tures of a life in time are the ' not yet ' and the ' no more \ 
and for these there is no place in a complete experience. As 

And every lovely organ of her life 
Shall come apparell'd in more precious habit, 
More moving delicate, and full of life, 
Into the eye and prospect of his soul, 
Than when she lived indeed. 
1 'The shape and colour of a mind and life' (Tennyson, Elaine). 



364 TIME AND ETERNITY lect. 

Professor McGilvary urges x : ' The time-order in which 

experienced events stand is an order into which they come. 

Now the Absolute experiences the order in which events 

stand ; but it fails to experience anything as novel or to feel 

any loss. Into the all-inclusive present of the Absolute 

nothing can enter : everything is already there. His time 

is therefore untimed time. The very entirety of his vision 

detemporalizes what he sees. . . . To look forward with 

bated breath or to stand on tiptoe of expectation; to strain 

our eyes for the first blush of dawn after our sorrows have 

endured through a long night; to watch by the bedside of 

a friend, sick it may be unto death, and have our hearts rise 

and fall with each unforeseen turn — such are the crises in 

which for all of us the experience of time culminates. The 

Absolute can have no inkling of what lies on the inside of 

such experiences. To see all at once is to fail to feel the 

temporal sequence as genuinely temporal.' But however 

poignantly we may feel the truth of such a passage, we must 

remember that just such a contrast is a necessary result of 

the situation : 

We that are not all, 

As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that, 

And live, perforce, from thought to thought, and make 

One act a phantom of succession : thus 

Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time. 

But it is an unreasoning procedure to seek to transfer this 
attitude to a universal Spirit. We must conceive, and we 
can in some sense understand, the temporal process as a 
necessary condition of the existence of partial minds, to 
which their content has to be communicated, which have 
to be made, or to make themselves, in commerce with the 
mighty whole. Time, in such a view, becomes an appear- 
ance incident to their partial nature. Time (and space) are 

1 ' Time and the Experience of Time,' Philosophical Review, vol. xxiii, 
p. 144. Professor McGilvary's criticism is perhaps directed more par- 
ticularly against Professor Royce's view of eternity as merely an all- 
inclusive view of the contents of time. 



xvm THE CONTAINING EXPERIENCE 365 

to be regarded, in short, as the principia individuationis, the 
forms of finite individuation, but as somehow transcended 
in the ultimate Experience on which we depend. Philoso- 
phers sometimes speak as if we could ourselves transcend 
these conditions. The mind, it is said, is not in space, and 
as knowing succession, some thinkers like to speak of it as 
itself timeless. But although the philosopher may constitute 
himself, in Plato's phrase, spectator of all time and all 
existence, his timelessness or spacelessness is only in a man- 
ner of speaking; for he views all time from his own ' Now ' 
and all space from the ' Here ' of his own body. It is his 
anchorage to a definite ' here ' and ' now ' that makes him a 
creature of time and place, that shapes his view of the world 
for him, and makes him incapable of realizing any other 
experience except as an abstract suggestion, or at most as a 
divination. In our attempts at description it is a case, as 
St. Augustine says, vel nosse ignorando vel ignorare no- 
scendo. But it does not follow, as Professor McGilvary sug- 
gests, that the containing experience is without ' an inkling 
of what lies on the inside ' of the doing and suffering of the 
creatures of time. The author also knows the end from the 
beginning, at least in the sense that the ground-plan of his 
story and its conclusion stand before him, so that he con- 
templates all the actions of his characters as steps in a des- 
tiny; yet he must himself feel, and make the reader enter 
into, the temporal outlook of his figures at each crisis of their 
fate. And if it be objected that this is intelligible because 
the author is himself, like the characters he creates, a creature 
of time, it may be retorted that it is everywhere the mark of 
the higher and wider experience to comprehend the lower 
and narrower, whereas the contrary is excluded by the very 
nature of the case. So the human intelligence can appre- 
ciate the dumb strivings of the animal mind, or a parent 
can sympathize with the ephemeral joys and unreasoning 
sorrows of his child. May we not extend the analog}-? 



LECTURE XIX 
BERGSONIAN TIME AND A GROWING UNIVERSE 

Time, then, seems one with the existence of the finite; and 
although the experience and the relations of time must be 
represented in the infinite Experience, this must be in a way 
which transcends our human perspective. So we might sum- 
marize the argument of the preceding lecture. It was a 
silent presupposition of the argument that time cannot be 
taken (in the current phrase) as ultimately real; that is to 
say, time, with all its implications of development and prog- 
ress, is an aspect of facts within the universe, — an aspect of 
central significance, we have contended, but still an aspect 
within the whole — not, as it were, a containing element in 
which the Absolute or the All exists, and through which it 
advances, garnering new being and perfections as it pro- 
ceeds. The idea of an absolute experience in which time is 
transcended is undoubtedly difficult, and the conception of a 
growing universe may seem, on a first statement, much 
easier; yet, as often as the conception has presented itself, 
we have set it aside as intrinsically incredible. A finite indi- 
vidual grows by appropriation from its environment — grows, 
in the last resort, by appropriation of the riches of the 
whole ; but we feel that, while we may properly speak of such 
processes within the whole, it is not less than unmeaning to 
speak of the whole itself as such a process. Yet that is what 
is supposed to be involved in M. Bergson's theory of ' crea- 
tive ' evolution, and it is certainly the meaning of the ' unfin- 
ished universe ' of William James and other Pluralists. The 
idea calls, therefore, for a more careful examination than 
we have hitherto given it. 

We have freely acknowledged the value of M. Bergson's 



xix SPATIALIZED TIME 367 

exposition of the true nature of duree reelle as the funda- 
mental characteristic of conscious life, and as distinguished 
from the spatialized time of physical theory and of ordinary 
reflective thinking, dominated as that is by spatial images. 
We habitually figure the course of time to ourselves under 
the image of a line. But, as M. Bergson insists, there can be 
no greater contrast than that between the continuity or flow- 
ing of real time — the mutual interpenetration of its parts 
with the conservation of the past in the present — and the 
static image which we construct for ourselves of conceptual 
time, as consisting of separate and mutually exclusive 
moments arranged in an order of juxtaposition, like the 
parts of a line in space. Thinking of time thus, it is no won- 
der that we cannot see our way through the paradoxes of 
Zeno about the impossibility of movement; for we have con- 
veyed into the fluent moments of time the same immobility 
and separateness which belongs to points of space, and so, as 
Zeno says, ' the flying arrow is always at rest \ 

In his first book, on Time and Free Will, M. Bergson has 
worked out impressively the influence of this spatialized idea 
of time in producing the peculiar illusion of determinism 
which represents us as the slaves of our own past, figured as 
a kind of external destiny. It is again the image of the line, 
giving an artificial permanence and externality to the cir- 
cumstances or actions of the past. But the past has no 
operative reality save as fused in the agent's present, and we 
have no right to transport ourselves in imagination to some 
point in the past and treat our future course of action as 
performed or predetermined there. As William James says, 
1 the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement 
of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that such things 
are really being decided from one moment to another, and 
that it is not the dull rattling oft of a chain that was forged 
innumerable ages ago V But, if we banish the associations 

1 Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 433- 



368 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

of the spatial image, we have in the self a development which 
is real at every point. The self is making itself continually 
by its own actions, and each of these actions is free in the 
ethical sense required. Hence, as M. Bergson says, the self 
* lives and develops till the free action detaches itself from 
it like a fruit overripe '. There is no necessity here to revive 
the idea of the liberum arbitrium, nor does M. Bergson 
appear to do so. It is enough that every act of moral choice 
is, in its very idea, free, and is recognized by the agent as 
such to the end, however settled in certain courses of actions 
he may have become. The ethical point obscured by the 
false conception of time is simply, as Professor Bosanquet 
expresses it, ' that nothing past, nothing external, is opera- 
tive in the agent's choice. It is all gathered up and made into 
the agent himself.' Hence, ' nothing but the agent deter- 
mines the act, and there is no sense in applying to him any 
" must " or " cannot help it " except in the sense that every- 
thing is what it is \* 

We are subject to the same spatial illusion in thinking of 
the course of the world as a whole. We project the content 
of the universe into the past, and conceive all that follows, in 
James's phrase, as ' the dull rattling off of a chain forged 
innumerable ages ago ' — a kind of destiny which the gener- 
ations have to undergo, or a programme which they have to 
work out as passive instruments. If we embody this fixed 
fate in a mechanical .system of material elements and forces, 
we have the common naturalistic creed ; but it may also take 
a theological form, as in doctrines of divine predestination 
where ' the purpose of God ' appears as a ' doom assigned '. 
There is also the idealistic form, in which the course of the 
world appears as the pre-determined evolution of a principle 
eternally perfect and complete. In all these cases, if the 
idea of complete determination is taken seriously, a paralysis 
tends to creep over the life of moral effort and practical 
1 Individuality and Value, p. 355. 



xix THE ILLUSION OF DETERMINISM 369 

activity. And we may agree with Bergson that it is prac- 
tically indifferent whether we adopt the naturalistic or the 
teleological alternative, that is to say, whether we regard the 
course of events as predetermined by the collocations of 
brute matter or by some divine Idea. Radical mechanism 
and radical finalism (so he calls the two theories) are in this 
respect at one, that in both, according to his favourite phrase, 
tout est donne, everything is given once for all. Finalism is, 
in this respect, ' only inverted mechanism ; it substitutes the 
attraction of the future for the impulsion of the past. But 
succession remains none the less a mere appearance.' a 

And here again, I think, we must agree with Bergson's 
analysis of the illusion, though we may not follow him in all 
the consequences which he draws from its rejection. If we 
transfer all real action to the past, action in the present 
becomes a hollow show. Our life in the present is no longer 
real ; it comes to resemble a dance of marionettes or a proces- 
sion of shadows. But it is the past which is the shadow — a 
shadow cast by our human reflection; the present alone is 
real, in the sense we are considering, whether we take it, with 
Bergson, as the growing-point of an advancing reality or as 
the temporal appearance of a reality which is in itself com- 
plete and eternal. Action therefore is real here and now, 
whether it is man's action or God's ; all the great issues are 
being really decided. It is wrong to place divine action in 
the past or in the future; but it is not, in the same way, 
wrong to place it in the present. The past and the future 
are essentially relative, and indeed negative, conceptions, the 
no-more and the not-yet; but the Ms ' of the present, if we 
take it as we do in action and in all direct experience, is not 
infected by the same relativity, and hence there is in it 
something comparable to eternity. If we speak of the 
divine activity as an eternal act, that means for us, if we 
throw it, as we must, into terms of time, an act which is 
1 Creative Evolution, p. 42. 



370 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

being accomplished now, and which we are helping to accom- 
plish. And it is quite in accordance with this view that 
theologians find it necessary (as we saw in a previous lec- 
ture) to supplement the doctrine of a creation once for all, 
by saying that the continuance of the world in existence is 
equivalent to a continually repeated act of creation — a state- 
ment which completely transforms the original doctrine. 
The passage from the one statement to the other represents 
the effort of the mind to emancipate itself from the spatial- 
ized form of time. To place the creative act in the past is 
rightly felt to be making it a mere event in time ; to treat it 
as the present act which sustains the universe is felt, with 
equal right, to lift it out of the temporal sequence and so to 
justify the predicate eternal. Every statement of religious 
truth must undergo the same transformation. Christ must 
die daily; the world is redeemed as well as created continu- 
ally, and the whole life of God is poured into what we call 
our human ' Now '. 

But the same spatial illusion, which he so successfully 
exposes in the case of the past, seems to beset M. Bergson 
himself when he comes to deal with the future. As is well 
known, the stress which he lays on the unpredictability, the 
unforeseeableness, of the future has led to his being regarded 
in many quarters as the apostle of pure contingency and 
irrationality. He develops his own account of ' creative ' 
evolution in contrast with the two rival theories of mech- 
anism and finalism, punctuating his statement chiefly by refer- 
ence to the ordinary teleological view. The essence of his 
theory seems included in the following statement : ' Reality 
appears as a ceaseless upspringing of something new. . . . 
This is already the case with our inner life. For each of our 
acts we shall easily find antecedents of which it may in some 
sort be said to be the mechanical resultant. And it may 
equally well be said that each action is the realization of an 
intention. In this sense mechanism is everywhere, and 



xix M. BERGSON AND THE FUTURE 371 

finality everywhere, in the evolution of our conduct. But if 
our action be one that involves the whole of our person and is 
truly ours, it could not have been foreseen, even though its 
antecedents explain it when once it has been accomplished. 
And though it be the realizing of an intention, it differs, as 
a present and new reality, from the intention, which can 
never aim at anything but recommencing or re-arranging the 
past. Mechanism and fmalism are, therefore, here only ex- 
ternal views of our conduct.' The same thing holds of 
organic evolution. * It would be futile to try to assign to life 
an end in the human sense of the word. ... Of course 
when once the road has been travelled, we can glance over it, 
mark its direction, note this in psychological terms, and 
speak as if there had been pursuit of an end. But of the road 
which was going to be travelled, the human mind could have 
nothing to say, for the road has been created pari passu with 
the act of travelling over it, being nothing but the direction 
of the act itself.' In short, ' reality is undoubtedly crea- 
tive, i. e. productive of effects in Avhich it expands and 
transcends its own being. These effects were therefore not 
given in it in advance, and so it could not take them for 
ends, although when once produced, they admit of a rational 
interpretation. . . . The future appears as expanding the 
present : it was not, therefore, contained in the present in 
the form of a represented end.' l 

Now if we take these statements simply as an account of 
the phenomenal process as it appears to a finite spectator or 
to an agent engaged in the process, their fidelity to the facts 
is beyond dispute. It is obvious that to the evolving sub- 
ject the end is not present in the form of idea : as regards 
organic nature, the perception of this is the basis of the whole 
doctrine of unconscious teleology, so general since Kant. 
And in the case of psychical activity, such as that of human 
beings, where the agent can really set before himself a defi- 
1 Creative Evolution, pp. 49-55. 



372 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

nite plan of action, it is equally true that the result is never 
exhaustively explained by reference to his intention. His 
intention, as M. Bergson acutely puts it, can reach only to the 
repetition or re-arrangement of what he already knows; but 
the result of his reaction upon the situation may be some- 
thing veritably new. On the large scale, this disparity be- 
tween intention and result is a commonplace of the poets 
and moralists. * Man proposes, God disposes.' 

There's a divinity doth shape our ends, 
Rough-hew them how we will. 
And the story of Saul, the son of Kish, who went out to seek 
his father's asses and found a kingdom,, has long been a 
favourite parable with idealist writers. The whole idealist 
view of history as a process of unconscious reason depends, 
indeed, on the recognition of this disparity. It meets us in 
all the details of political and social action. The fabric of 
civilized society or of a nation's institutions was not made 
according to any pattern consciously present as idea, but is 
the cumulative result of actions taken to relieve pressing 
needs, and successively modified in view of unforeseen 
effects till a tolerable modus vivendi was arrived at. The 
path, as M. Bergson puts it, is created pari passu with the act 
of travelling over it. And yet, although so little apparently 
is due to definite human foresight, we instinctively feel, when 
face to face with the result, that some greater Reason has 
guided the process to ends so august. In artistic creation, 
again, the finished work of art is not explicable as the delib- 
erate expression or embodiment of a clearly formed idea. 
The first idea in the mind of the poet, the painter, the sculp- 
tor, the musician, is vague, more like a feeling flashing into 
a visual or auditory image ; but, as he works it out, it takes 
definite shape and colour from the exigencies and felicities 
of the material in which he works. It evolves itself step by 
step, and the artist would be puzzled to say how much of the 
final result was included in his original conception, and how 



xix UNPREDICTABILITY 373 

much has added itself as he went along, in the silent com- 
merce with his materials. 

He builded better than he knew, 
The conscious stone to beauty grew. 

And once more, in the development of ideals, as was insisted 
in an earlier lecture, we possess at the outset no adequate and 
full-orbed idea of perfection. Our idea grows from less to 
more in the stress of life and in intercourse with the many- 
sided world. New features disclose themselves as we pro- 
ceed, and the baser and ruder elements fall away, till the 
link of identity between the first stage and the last is worn 
almost too thin for recognition. 

Everywhere, therefore, in experience we have this phe- 
nomenon of the unpredictability of the consequent from its 
apparent antecedents. In this respect M. Bergson's conten- 
tion has a manifest affinity with the principle which Profes- 
sor Bosanquet so often enforces, that in logic and life we 
constantly do pass beyond our premisses. The stream is 
constantly found rising above its source, despite the adage, 
for only so can any real advance be accounted for. But the 
idealistic tradition which I have followed in the main in 
these lectures regards this advance as taking place in the 
finite evolving subject, or from the point of view of such a 
subject, not from the point of view of the whole, as if the 
* expansion and transcendence of its own being ' in unfore- 
seen directions represented the experience of the Absolute 
itself. It was, indeed, a main thread in our argument that 
only through the presence in the finite of an infinite Perfec- 
tion was such advance and self-transcendence on its part 
possible. But M. Bergson's followers and acclaimers, if not 
M. Bergson himself, apply this idea of growth or progress in 
time to the universe as a whole; and in the new possibilities, 
the new horizons, which it opens up they celebrate their 
deliverance from what James calls ' the rationalistic block- 



374 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

universe ' or ' the static, timeless, perfect Absolute V And 
to James certainly novelty means pure indetermination or 
contingence. ' That genuine novelties can occur,' he says, 
1 means that from the point of view of what is already given, 
what comes may have to be treated as a matter of chance! 2 
The question in regard to new being is, ' Is it through and 
through the consequence of older being or is it matter of 
chance so far as older being goes — which is the same thing 
as asking: Is it original, in the strict sense of the word? ' 3 
So again, praising Renouvier as his deliverer from ' the 
Monistic superstition ' under which he had grown up, he 
says that Renouvier on his own principles ' could believe in 
absolute novelties, unmediated beginnings, gifts, chance, 
freedom, acts of faith '. 4 M. Bergson himself, although he 
repudiates the idea of caprice, 5 lays great stress, as we have 
seen, on ' the absolute originality and unforeseeability of 
the different stages in a process of living evolution '. 6 In 
the same context he uses the expression, ' There is radical 
contingency in progress, incommensurability between what 
goes before and what follows, in short, duration '. So he 
speaks in another place of ' putting duration and free choice 
at the base of things \ 7 ' If time ', he says, ' is not a kind of 
force, why does the universe unfold its successive states with 
a definite velocity? . . . Why is not everything given at 
once, as on the film of the cinematograph ? The more I con- 
sider this point, the more it seems to me that, if the future 
is bound to succeed the present, instead of being given along- 
side of it, it is because the future is not altogether determined 
at the present moment ... it is because in the time taken 
up by this succession there is unceasingly being created in 
the concrete whole something unforeseeable and new.' 8 



X A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 318, 327. 

2 Problems of Philosophy, p. 145 ; italics his own. 

8 Ibid., p. 145. 4 Ibid., p. 164. 6 Creative Evolution, p. 50. 

6 Ibid., p. 30. 7 Ibid., p. 291. 8 Ibid., pp. 358-9- 



xix THE SPATIAL ILLUSION AGAIN 375 

But the stress thus laid upon contingency is surely due to 
the persistence of the spatial illusion in regard to time from 
which M. Bergson claims to deliver us. He emancipates us 
from the spectre of fatalistic determination of the present by 
the past, by showing the fallacy involved in substantiating 
past acts and states like external forces in space. But if we 
cease to hypnotize ourselves by the projected image of the 
past — if we recognize that every being acts from its own 
living present — why should we involve ourselves in precisely 
similar difficulties by projecting the future as a similar line 
in the opposite direction, and thinking of the present as 
fatally and externally determining the future beforehand, in 
such a way as to deprive future actions, when they occur, of 
their proper reality ? It was the determination of the present 
beforehand that was felt to be intolerable, and just that 
determination constituted the illusion; and now it is the 
same illusion transferred to the future, from which we try 
to escape by the assertion of contingency at every step. But 
if we are true to the doctrine of real duration, we have 
nothing to do with this phantom future any more than with 
the other phantom of the past. We live and act only in the 
present ; and every action has its own reality and, in the case 
of conscious action, its own freedom, just as the divine 
activity which sustains and guides the world is to be thought 
of as the expression of a present mind and will, not as the 
consequence of past decrees which bind God himself like a 
fate. The whole deterministic difficulty in its ordinary form 
arises from our taking time in this spatial perspective. If 
we avoid the error db initio, therefore, the dilemma of deter- 
minism or freedom does not arise, and consequently there 
is no temptation to safeguard freedom by the introduction 
of contingency. If, as M. Bergson says, we act now with 
our whole past, and yet are free, why should this be other- 
wise in the future, when what is now present will constitute 
part of the past which we carry with us? 



376 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

But if we identify reality, as has been suggested, with a 
living present, it must not be forgotten that the mere present 
is just as much an abstraction as the dead past and the non- 
existent future. From our human point of view we instinc- 
tively think of the life of the world as concentrated in a very 
special sense in the present; and it is legitimate to do so, 
because we, also instinctively, take the present as rooted in 
an eternal reality, of which it is a partial expression. If it 
were not for this eternal background, we should be reduced 
to the intolerable paradox of identifying the reality of the 
universe with what is shown in our empirical present. ' Is 
the history of the world really reduced ', Lotze asks, ' to the 
infinitely thin, for ever changing, strip of light which forms 
the Present, marching between a darkness of the Past, which 
is done with and no longer anything at all, and a darkness 
of the Future, which is also nothing? ' Even in these ex- 
pressions, as he truly says, he is yielding to the imaginative 
tendency which seeks to soften the incredible. ' For these 
two abysses of obscurity, however formless and empty, 
would still be there, would still afford a kind of local habita- 
tion for the not-being, into which it might have disappeared 
or from which it might come forth. But let any one try to 
dispense with these images and to banish from thought even 
the two voids, which limit being: he will then feel how 
impossible it is to get along with the naked antithesis of 
being and not-being, and how unconquerable is the demand 
to be able to think even of that which is not as some unac- 
countable constituent of the real.' 1 

This unconquerable demand means that we instinctively 
treat past, present, and future as organic to one another; 
in dealing with any present phenomenon, we interpret its 
nature both by what it has been and by what it has in it to 
become. Just so far as we succeed in this interpretation, do 
we conceive ourselves to understand the reality operative 

1 Metaphysic, Book II, chap, iii, section 157. 



xix FULL STOP WITH THE PRESENT 377 

in the phenomenal series; and to understand the time- 
sequence in this way is, I have argued, in an important sense 
to transcend its temporal aspect. But in M. Bergson's 
theory, as we know, the temporal aspect is exclusively 
emphasized, and his critique of teleology comes very near 
a denial of any eternal principle in the development. Hence, 
I think, arises the want of balance, on which I have com- 
mented, between his treatment of the past and his treatment 
of the future. It would be unfair to accuse M. Bergson of 
treating the present as a ' mere present - ; for his insistence 
on the conservation of the past in the present and its opera- 
tion there as character and tendency is, as we have seen, 
one of the luminous insights of his philosophy. But with 
the present the reality of the universe seems in his account 
to come to a stop. The process up to date is treated as if it 
could stand alone, and were intelligible by itself; and the 
future appears, therefore, not as an inseparable part of the 
same development, but, as it were, something tacked on, a 
realm of the unknown, and consequently the appropriate 
home of the contingent. But to regard the future in this 
inorganic fashion as something entirely new, in which any- 
thing may happen, 1 is to desert the principle which has 
already been acknowledged in the relation of past and pres- 
ent. And it is also to forget the essentially anticipatory 
character of conscious action, as purposive, and all that is 
implied in the causality of the ideal. In point of fact, by 
placing the fountain of reality entirely in the past and treat- 
ing it as a vis a tergo, M. Bergson really comes nearer to 
the determinism which he attacks than is the case with a 
more frankly teleological point of view. ' Harmony ', he 
says, ' is rather behind us than before. It is due to an iden- 
tity of impulsion and not to a common aspiration. It would 

1 Recall James's phrases, ' genuine novelties ', ' unmediated begin- 
nings, gifts, chance, freedom ', and M. Bergson's own assertions, already 
quoted, of a ' radical contingency in progress, incommensurability be- 
tween what goes before and what follows \ 



378 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

be futile to try to assign to life an end in the human sense 
of the word.' x When he makes this statement — emphasiz- 
ing it as ' the point in which finalism has been most seriously 
mistaken ' — he is speaking at the biological level ; but from 
life M. Bergson continually passes to consciousness, and 
consciousness is, as a matter of fact, his all-inclusive term. 
If it were necessary, however, to choose between placing the 
vis directrix in the past or in the future, it would be more 
consonant with the structure of consciousness, as we have 
already seen, to place it in the future — not, indeed, as a 
clearly conceived end, but as glimpses of a fairer and a 
better, the ' Gleam ' which we follow, the Good, in short, 
1 which every soul pursues as the end of all its actions, divin- 
ing its existence, but perplexed and unable satisfactorily to 
apprehend its nature \ 2 But to force such a choice upon us 
is a mistake ; the source of reality dwells neither in the past 
nor in the future. The three dimensions of Time (if I may 
so call them) are rather our human ways of refracting the 
Eternal Nature in which we live and on which we draw. 

In the absence of such a Nature, everything reduces itself 
to pure contingency ; for, as a prins or mere beginning, the 
elan vital is mere indeterminateness. It is comparable to the 
infinite outgoing activity with which Fichte proposed to 
start. Fichte supplied his activity with an Anstoss against 
which to break itself ; and M. Bergson, impelled by the same 
necessity, offers us a deduction of matter as the refractory 
element into which the principle of life or free conscious- 
ness 3 has to infuse itself — the realm of mechanical necessity 
which it seeks, in his own phrase, ' to penetrate with con- 
tingency \ But if life, in its contact with matter, is thus 
comparable to an impulsion or an impetus, regarded in itself, 

1 Creative Evolution, p. 54. 2 Plato, Republic, 505. 

8 ' For want of a better word we have called it consciousness. But we 
do not mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us.' 
' If our analysis is correct, it is consciousness or rather super -conscious- 
ness, that is at the origin of life' (Creative Evolution, pp. 250, 275). 



xix ' AN IMMENSITY OF POTENTIALITY ' 379 

he reminds us, it can only be described as ' an immensity of 
potentiality ' (virtaalite). And in its action there is ' prop- 
erly speaking neither project nor plan '. The anxiety to 
1 transcend finalism ' thus leaves the nature of the creative 
principle a complete blank. Freedom in the negative sense 
of indetermination or contingency appears to be the only 
predicate applicable to it, and the only description of the 
ends which it seeks to realize. 1 If so, it is impossible not to 
sympathize with Mr. Balfour's feelings of ' a certain incon- 
gruity between the substance of such a philosophy and the 
sentiments associated with it by its author. Creation, free- 
dom, will — these doubtless are great things; but we cannot 
lastingly admire them unless we know their drift. We can- 
not, I submit, rest satisfied with what differs so little from 
the haphazard; joy is no fitting consequent of efforts which 
are so nearly aimless. If values are to be taken into account, 
it is surely better to invoke God with a purpose, than supra- 
consciousness with none.' 2 

Just at this point, however, M. Bergson leaves us in uncer- 
tainty as to his final teaching. Accused of preaching an 
atheistic monism, he has claimed that his doctrine is not only 
not inconsistent with Theism, but points directly to that 
conclusion. In a letter printed in 19 12 he tells us that the 
arguments of his three books should leave us with ' a clear 
idea of a free and creating God, producing matter and life at 
once, whose creative effort is continued, in a vital direction, 
by the evolution of species and the construction of human 
personalities '. The letter is quoted by M. Le Roy at the 
close of his appreciative sketch, A New Philosophy; and 
M. Bergson expressly endorses M. Le Roy's protest, in the 

1 ' It seizes upon matter . . . and strives to introduce into it the largest 
possible amount of indetermination and liberty.' (p. 265.) 'A living 
being represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the world.' 
(p. 276.) 

2 Hibbert Journal, October 191 1, at the close of a sympathetic appreci- 
ation, entitled ' Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt '. 



3 8o A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

context, against the habit of ' asking an author continually 
to do something other than he has done, or, in what he has 
done, to give us the whole of his thought \ He accepts 
M. Le Roy's description of his method of proceeding, in his 
successive volumes, from problem to problem, and dealing 
with each according to its specific and original nature, and 
acknowledges the possibility, consequently, of further devel- 
opments of his doctrine upon the basis of an analysis of 
moral and religious experience. 1 

If we give the Philosophy of Change such a theistic back- 
ground, it becomes perhaps a less striking doctrine, but it 
ceases to present the fundamental incredibility of which I 
complain. ' Reality is undoubtedly creative, i. e. produc- 
tive of effects in which it transcends and expands its own 
being.' 2 Taken in a phenomenological reference, there is 
no difficulty in recognizing the truth of such a statement. 
The ' creative ' aspect of the evolutionary process in this 
respect, and the ' increment of being ' which successive 
stages bring with them, was frequently emphasized in our 

x ' In this direction I should myself say exactly what you have said ' 
(letter to M. Le Roy, quoted in his Preface). M. Bergson, in the origi- 
nal letter in reply to his critics, had himself referred to the fact that he 
had not yet dealt with the problems of morality. It is, I think, permis- 
sible to mention that at a discussion in the Edinburgh University Philo- 
sophical Society in May 1914, during the delivery of his first course of 
Gifford Lectures, M. Bergson somewhat surprised the members of the 
Society by saying, when pressed on this ultimate question, that he did 
not profess to have a metaphysical system. Each of his volumes repre- 
sented his concentration upon a specific problem, for which he had 
sought to find an appropriate solution by soaking his mind, as it were, 
in the relevant facts. In this way he had been led from one problem to 
another, while other important problems remained unexplored. But he 
was inclined to distinguish between philosophy as the outcome and solu- 
tion of such definite problems and the more or less ' hypothetical ' views 
one might hold on larger and more ultimate questions. The whole 
account of Life and its creative evolution, with 'the ideal genesis of 
matter ', he appeared prepared, accordingly, to regard as the rationale of 
a phenomenal process, while accepting (as a hypothetical belief in the 
sense just indicated) the idea of a Creator, the end of whose action 
was ' the creation of creators '. 

2 Creative Evolution, pp. 49-50. 



xix A THEISTIC INTERPRETATION 381 

first series of lectures, as well as the unforeseeableness of 
each new stage from the standpoint of the old. Such prog- 
ress or advance appeared a fundamental and undeniable 
fact; and we found it intelligible on the assumption of an 
absolute source of the perfections successively revealed. 
The incredibility only arises, if we take ' reality ' in an all- 
inclusive sense to designate the All, and to include, there- 
fore, the God of whose progressive activity the advancing 
wave of life is the expression. 

I do not wish to snatch a verbal victory by playing on 
the word Universe or Infinite or the All — by arguing, I 
mean, that what is, by definition, all-inclusive and complete 
is not susceptible of growth, addition, or improvement. It 
is possible to deny the existence of a universe in the sense of 
a single systematic whole. Pluralism, for example, means, 
I suppose, that the universe is, in the last resort, an aggre- 
gate ; although a certain amount of system or coherence may 
be traced among its separate facts, and this order may be 
extended by the mind and will of human and other intelli- 
gencies. But even if the universe be taken as a mere fact or 
sum of facts, it is there, once for all, in its nature as it is. 
The ' Being is ' of Parmenides is, in this reference, the last 
word that can be said about it. It is impossible to get away 
from the existent fact and its nature. Whatever combina- 
tions may result within it, whatever qualities it may exhibit, 
must be due to its own inherent constitution. It is easy for 
a critic to appeal to material and social combinations or 
syntheses, where we get qualities in the compound or the 
social group which are not to be found in the elements or 
members separately. But the novelty in such cases is not, 
as it were, a creation or a spurt out of nothing; it is the 
result of the togetherness of existing elements and the mutual 
reactions grounded in their natures. So far as it goes, it is 
proof that the universe does not consist of bits of unrelated 
stuff lying about, but is a fact with a certain amount of 



382 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

systematic structure discernible among its parts. Qualities, 
therefore, which are educed by reaction to an environment, 
physical or social, cannot be regarded as extraneous to the 
universe as a whole. Moral progress might seem the most 
plausible case of such real novelty through the creation of 
fresh values. But, as we have seen, the verdict of the moral 
consciousness on its own advance emphatically repudiates 
the idea suggested that it is actually creating these values 
and raising the moral level of the universe. The reality of 
the ideal and its infinite transcendence of finite attainment 
is the very note of moral and religious experience. 

I am confirmed in my view of the impossibility of regard- 
ing the universe as a growing whole, by observing that those 
who hold to the idea of what James calls ' the strung-along 
unfinished world in time V and who advocate the creed of 
' Meliorism ', do not make it clear, and apparently are not 
themselves clear, whether the idea of progress and better- 
ment is to be applied to the universe as a whole or only to 
certain beings in it. M. Bergson's somewhat ambiguous 
attitude we have just considered. It is not clear whether he 
regards the creative source of the life-movement as also 
growing from less to more in the process of experience. 
William James falls back upon the notion of a finite God. 
He distinguishes sharply between God and the Absolute. 
God is not the All, but, as he puts it in a characteristic phrase, 
' one of the eaches ', an individual in the universe, ' finite, 
either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once ', ' hav- 
ing an environment, being in time and working out a history 
just like ourselves \ 2 But again it is not clear whether this 
God is morally perfect to begin with — in which case the 
development and progress would consist simply in the moral 
enlightenment and betterment of human beings and similar 

X A Pluralistic Universe, p. 128. Cf . Pragmatism, p. 264 : ' the whole 
spread-out and strung-along mass of phenomena '. 
2 A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 44, 311, 3 J & 



xix AMBIGUITY OF MELIORISM 383 

races in other regions of the universe — or whether the finite 
God is himself conceived as growing in insight and in moral 
wisdom through the lessons of experience, and working out 
his own character as he proceeds with his beneficent work. 
In the latter case, one is at a loss to see why the title of God 
should be bestowed on an individual essentially of the 
human type, though, no doubt, on a larger scale and at 
a higher stage of development; and one is bound to con- 
clude that such a developing demigod would give the same 
account of his own development as the moral and religious 
man among ourselves. He would describe it as a new insight 
into the nature of things, due to the leading of a higher God, 
who would be God indeed. It seems to me impossible to 
override the testimony of the religious consciousness on this 
point. As we have contended, such experience is only pos- 
sible to a finite being rooted in an infinite nature. And from 
an ultimate metaphysical point of view, it appears to me, our 
conclusion must be that progress is predicable only of the 
part which can interact with other parts, and, in such inter- 
action, has the nature of the whole to draw upon. It is 
unintelligible as applied to the whole, and the temporal view 
of things cannot therefore be ultimate or all-inclusive. 1 
1 See Supplementary Note E (God and the Absolute), p. 430. 

NOTE ON M. BERGSON'S DOCTRINE OF TIME 

There are other points in which M. Bergson's account of 
time seems open to criticism. He has rightly exposed the 
errors which result from the persistence of spatial imagery in 
our conceptions of time. But in his polemic against the idea 
of the line, with its juxtaposition of our past states as mutually 
external points, he comes himself very near to denying any 
knowledge of the past as past. ' Pure duration' , we are told, 
would be ' nothing but a succession of qualitative changes 
which melt into and permeate one another, without precise out- 
lines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in rela- 
tion to one another, without any affiliation with number: it 
would be pure heterogeneity.' According to M. Bergson's 



384 A GROWING UNIVERSE lect. 

most frequent comparison, the sensations ' add themselves 
dynamically to one another and organize themselves like the 
successive notes of a tune by which we allow ourselves to be 
lulled and soothed'. 1 The result is comparable to the summa- 
tion of slight but continuously repeated stimuli, or, again, ' this 
organization of units in the depths of the soul is a wholly 
dynamic process, not unlike the purely qualitative way in which 
an anvil, if it could feel, would realize a series of blows from 
a hammer'. 2 But this qualitative survival of the past in the 
present does not seem to give us more than a peculiarly modi- 
fied present; or, at least, the penumbra of the past suggested 
by the analogies is so vague as hardly to suffice for the sharp 
rudimentary distinction between the' now ' and the ' no longer', 
much less for a dated knowledge of our mental history. M. 
Bergson's delicate psychological analysis of the phenomena he 
cites in illustration seems to divert his attention from the 
simpler experiences of loss or deprivation and of waiting ex- 
pectancy, in which the child's consciousness of the no-more 
and the not-yet originates. Our dated knowledge of past and 
future is a gradual development of this rudimentary contrast. 
But because our perspective becomes more definite in both di- 
rections, it surely does not lose its original temporal character. 
Nor can I reconcile myself to phrases which describe time as 
'the very stuff of reality'. This phrase is constantly repeated 
in slightly varying forms by M. Bergson and his followers. 
Thus Mr. Wildon Carr tells us that ' when we consider a living 
being, we feel that time is the very essence of its life, the 
whole meaning of its reality'. 3 Or again he speaks of ' a 
living thing, whose whole existence is time'. There are two 
ways, he says, in which we may think of time, ' one in which 
it makes no difference to reality, and the other in which it is 
the reality. . . . The answer that philosophy must give is that 
time is real, the stuff of which things are made.' 4 Except as 
transparent metaphors, intended to emphasize the reality of 
process or change as against the eternity of the metaphysicians 
he is attacking, such expressions seem quite unmeaning. 
Change or development in time may be a fundamental feature 
of reality, but it cannot literally be reality, life, or conscious- 

1 Time and Free Will, pp. 103-4. 2 Ibid., p. 123. 

3 Henri Bergson, p. 17 (People's Books). 

4 Ibid., p. 19. M. Bergson uses almost identical language in Creative 
Evolution, pp. 4, 41, 254, 257, 334-5. 



xix THE UNIVERSAL FLUX 385 

ness. Obviously change and duration is an empty abstraction 
apart from some nature or content which changes or 'dures'. 
An ultra-Heraclitean doctrine of universal flux, such as the 
literal sense of the words implies, would mean the discarding 
of all qualitative distinctions whatsoever. Passages might be 
quoted in support of the view that this is the hidden truth of 
the Bergsonian thought. ' Reality is a flowing,' says Mr. Carr. 
1 This does not mean that everything moves, changes, and be- 
comes ; science and common experience tell us that. It means 
that movement, change, becoming, is everything that there is, 
there is nothing else. . . . You have not grasped the central 
idea of this philosophy, you have not perceived true duration, 
you have not got the true idea of change and becoming until 
you perceive duration, change, movement, becoming, to be 
reality, the whole and only reality.' * 

These sentences seem based on some very Heraclitean state- 
ments in the last chapter of Creative Evolution, where M. 
Bergson attributes the partial fixation of the universal flux, as 
things and qualities, to ' the cinematographical instinct of our 
thought'. ' But in reality the body is changing form at every 
moment, or rather there is no form, since form is immobile and 
the reality is movement.' 2 But I am loath to believe that it is 
M. Bergson's genuine intention to attribute all qualitative dis- 
tinction to the distorting function of the intellect, and to iden- 
tify reality with the qualityless abstraction of change or move- 
ment as such. An unearthly ballet of bloodless categories 
would be concrete in comparison. 

* Henri Bergson, pp. 28-9. 

2 Creative Evolution, p. 319 (italics mine). Cf. pp. 333-5. 



LECTURE XX 

PLURALISM 

EVIL AND SUFFERING 

We have touched in the preceding lecture on the pluralistic 
position and the idea of a finite God, but Pluralism in various 
forms is so current — I had almost said, so fashionable — at 
the present moment, that it seems to call for some further 
examination on its merits. We have already encountered it, 
in connexion with the idea of Creation, in Professor Howi- 
son's doctrine of eternal finite selves. Founding on the 
characteristic feature of a self or person, that it cannot be 
made or fashioned like a thing, ab extra, but seems rather to 
make itself, and that it acts, moreover, always from its own 
centre, and unhesitatingly regards its acts as its own, Pro- 
fessor Howison insisted, as we saw, on treating finite persons 
as ontologically underived, or existent in their own right. 
He acknowledged at the same time that, as regards their 
animating ideals, they all reflect the nature of a divine or 
central Mind, and thus constitute, together with it, a single 
system of reality. As in Leibnitz, a real or ontological 
Pluralism is thus combined with an ideal ' harmony ', and 
the unity of the universe is supposed to be thereby saved. 
But again, just as Leibnitz forgets the independent self-sub- 
sistence of the monads when he treats them as created by 
God and speaks of them as ' figurations ' of the divine, 
so we found that Professor Howison's statements as to the 
constant reference of the finite selves to their divine centre, 
and his view of the divine nature as the final cause of the 
development which takes place in these selves, constitute 
a virtual abandonment of the ontological Pluralism which 
he champions. 



xx DR. RASHDALL'S THEORY 387 

Dr. Rashdall, inasmuch as he expressly holds the finite 
selves to be created, would disavow the imputation of Plural- 
ism. But he has repeatedly introduced the idea of the 
finiteness of God as limited by other selves, and has con- 
tended, accordingly, for a distinction between God and the 
Absolute. ' The Absolute cannot be identified with God, 
so long as God is thought of as a self-conscious Being. The 
Absolute must include God and all other consciousnesses, 
not as isolated and unrelated beings, but as intimately related 
(in whatever way) to Him and to one another, and as 
forming with Him a system or Unity. . . . God and the 
spirits are the Absolute — not God alone. Together they 
form a Unity, but that Unity is not the unity of self -con- 
sciousness.' * Reality is thus ' a community of persons \ 
or in Dr. McTaggart's phrase ' a society \ 2 It is true, he 
protests against the idea of a limitation ab extra, by a hostile 
power or an independent matter; the limitation in question 
is, in the language of the theologians, a self-limitation. But, 
as Professor Ward pertinently says, commenting on this 
phrase, ' self -limitation seems to imply a prior state in which 
it was absent, whereas a limitation held to be permanent — as 
we hold creation to be — suggests some ultimate dualism 
rather than an ultimate unity '. 3 And if we hold, as Pro- 
fessor Ward says, that ' God is God only as being creative ', 4 

1 The Theory of Good and Evil, ii. 239-40. 

2 Personal Idealism, pp. 391-2. 
8 Realm of Ends, p. 243. 

4 Ibid., p. 234. 'If creation means anything/ says Professor Ward 
in the same context, ' it means something so far involved in the divine 
essence that we are entitled to say, as Hegel was fond of saying, that 
" without the world, God is not God ".' The saying which Professor 
Ward thus frankly adopts, suggests to Dr. Rashdall the picture of 'God 
as perpetually annexed by some unintelligible fate to a world quite alien 
to His own inner nature as to some Siamese twin from whom He would 
perchance, but cannot, part' (Contentio Veritatis, p. S3)- But this is 
inconsistent with his own subsequent description of the limitation im- 
plied in the creation of other spirits as ' not an arbitrary self-limitation 
but one which necessarily springs from the nature and character of God ' 
(p. 37). Why should the necessity of the divine nature be resented 



388 PLURALISM lect. 

the deceptive prius disappears, and with it the wholly inap- 
propriate conception of limitation. This was the gist of our 
argument in Lecture VII. Why should the creation of finite 
spirits be treated like a pegging out of claims in a hinterland, 
by each of which the rights and privileges of the original 
proprietor are proportionately diminished ? Surely the older 
theologians were right in regarding the existence of spirits 
not as an impoverishment but as an enrichment of the divine 
life. The divine life is, in short, the concrete fact of this 
inter-communion. 

In this sense there is no difficulty in accepting Professor 
Ward's definition of the Absolute as ' God-and-the-world V 
regarded as the single eternal Fact. But it is not quite the 
same with Dr. Rashdall's phrase, ' God and the spirits ' ; 
for in spite of the creative function assigned to God, the 
suggestion of the phrase is co-existence on terms of mutual 
exclusion. And this impression is strengthened when we 
are told that 'the ultimate Being is a single Power, if we 
like we may even say a single Being, who is manifested in 
a plurality of consciousnesses, one consciousness which is 
omniscient and eternal, and many consciousnesses which 
are of limited knowledge, which have a beginning, and 
some of which, it is possible or probable, have an end '. 2 
And when Dr. Rashdall goes on to say that we may ' regard 
all the separate " centres of consciousness " as " manifesta- 
tions " of a single Being ', or even as a single ' Substance 
which reveals itself in many different consciousnesses ', 3 we 



as an unintelligible fate? Dr. Rashdall emphasizes the importance of 
recognizing 'a causative relation between the supreme Spirit and ihe 
other spirits' (p. 34), but if I may quote Professor Ward again in this 
connexion, ' Creation is not to be brought under the category of transient 
causation. Nor can we, regarding it from the side of God, bring it 
under the category of immanent causation as being a change in Him, 
unless indeed we abandon the position that God is God only as being 
creative' (Realm of Ends, p. 234). 

1 Realm of Ends, p. 241. 2 Theory of Good and Evil, vol. ii, p. 241. 

3 Philosophy an$ Religion, p. 105, 



xx GOD AS ' ONE OF THE SELVES ' 389 

feel irresistibly that by such expressions we are being com- 
mitted to a view of God as ' one of the eaches ', for we 
are treating Him not as the ultimate Reality but as one of 
a number of ' separate ' appearances. But there is surely 
a singular impropriety in placing God and men in the same 
numerical series, and in speaking as if we and God together, 
in a species of joint-ownership, constituted the sum-total 
of existence. Dr. Rashdall speaks of ' that all-fertile source 
of philosophical error, the misapplication of spatial meta- 
phors. Minds are not Chinese boxes that can be put " in- 
side " one another V But we do not get away from spatial 
metaphors by speaking of separate and mutually exclusive 
centres of consciousness. And if the assertion of the per- 
sonality of God is to lead us to the result that ' all the con- 
clusions which are applicable to each particular self in his 
relation to another seem to be equally applicable to the 
relations between God and any other spirit ', 2 we must reply 
that it is ultimately unmeaning to treat the universal as one 
of the particulars. To speak of God in this sense as ' one of 
the selves ' is to justify all the criticisms which treat per- 
sonality as a limitation inapplicable to the sustaining and 
containing Life of all the worlds. Besides the unescapable 
associations of spatial metaphor, the controversy seems to 
me to be due to the substantiation of the form of conscious- 
ness apart from its content or constituent nature. It was 
the substantiation of the logical form of consciousness, as 
I argued long ago, 3 which led to the theory of the universal 

1 Personal Idealism, p. 388. 2 Ibid., p. 386. 

3 In the concluding pages of Hegelianism and Personality. I have 
many times regretted, in view of the interpretations put upon it and the 
applications made of it, my use in these pages of the term ' impervious ' 
to describe the nature of a self or personality. The exclusiveness of the 
self, especially in its relations to the divine, was, I have little doubt, too 
strongly emphasized in my argument. But the obnoxious term has to 
be understood in the context in which it occurs. The argument was 
directed against the fusion of real selves in a logical universal or (to put 
it in a frankly spatial metaphor) the identification of all selves at a 
single point of being. What I emphasized, as against this attempt, was 



39o PLURALISM lect. 

Self, as an identical Subject which thinks in all thinkers. 
And this unification of consciousness in a single Self was 
fatal, I argued, to the real selfhood either of God or man. 
But we are equally substantiating a formal unity, if we cut 
loose the individual selves from the common content of the 
world and treat them as self -existent and mutually inde- 
pendent units. We are then obliged to proceed to represent 
the universal Life in which they share as another unit of 
the same type, and difficulties immediately arise as to the 
relation between the great Self and its minor prototypes. 
Thought sways between a Pluralism, disguised or undi- 
guised, and a Pantheism which obliterates all real individu- 
ality. But by the existence of the personality of God we do 
not mean the existence of a self-consciousness so conceived. 
We mean that the universe is to be thought of, in the last 
resort, as an Experience and not as an abstract content — an 
experience not limited to the intermittent and fragmentary 
glimpses of this and the other finite consciousness, but 
resuming the whole life of the world in a fashion which is 
necessarily incomprehensible save by the Absolute itself. 1 

the uniqueness of each self. I took the self, and I still take it, as the 
apex of the principle of individuation by which the world exists. Hence 
the phrase that each self is ' impervious ' — not, it may be observed, to all 
the influences of the universe but ' to other selves ' — ' impervious in a 
fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue '. In 
other words, to suppose a coincidence or literal identification of several 
selves, as the doctrine of the Universal Self demands, is even more 
transparently self-contradictory than that two bodies should occupy the 
same space. Apart from crudity of expression this still seems to me 
obvious, and it may be considered to underlie the argument in several of 
the preceding lectures. But I trust there is now more justice done to the 
identity of content which binds the selves together as members of one 
universe. 

1 We call God personal because in personality is revealed the highest 
we know, and it is better, therefore, as Mr. Bradley says, to affirm per- 
sonality than to call the Absolute impersonal. The epithet, like the state- 
ments of the creeds, is the denial of an error rather than a definitely 
articulated affirmation of ascertained fact. And if the affirmation of 
personality were taken to imply identity of conditions, then, but for its 
tendency to become a merely empty name, supra-personal would ob- 
viously more appropriately express our meaning. 



xx DR. McTAGGART'S ABSOLUTE 391 

Equally incomprehensible from the finite standpoint must 
it be, how the measure of individual independence and 
initiative which we enjoy is compatible with the creative 
function or the all-pervasive activity of the divine. 1 But 
in whatever sense or in whatever way our thoughts and 
actions form part of the divine experience, we know that it 
is a sense which does not prevent them from being ours. 
We were agreed that no speculative difficulties could over- 
ride this primary certainty. 

Dr. McTaggart presents his theory as a form of Idealism, 
and he also would repudiate the label of Pluralism, inas- 
much as he believes the universe to be a systematic whole. 
But as compared with the views of Professor Howison and 
Dr. Rashdall which we have been considering, Dr. McTag- 
gart's theory is more consistently and uncompromisingly 
pluralistic, in so far as it dispenses altogether with the cen- 
trality of reference which is signified by the conception of 
God. The unity of his Absolute is that of a society. His 
favourite analogy is ' a College ', 2 although he has the grace 
to admit that ' of course the Absolute is a far more perfect 
unity than a College '. As a unity of persons, though not 
itself a person, a College is ' a spiritual unity ' ; but, as he 
candidly and somewhat disconcertingly reminds us, ' every 
goose-club, every gang of thieves ' has a similar right to the 
term.* Dr. McTaggart's theory of the Absolute is in reality 
an immediate consequence of his view of the self as ' a sub- 
stance existing in its own right '. 4 ' This does not mean \ 
he says, ' that any self could exist independently and in 
isolation from all others. Each self can only exist in virtue 
of its connexion with all the others and with the Abso- 
lute which is their unity. But this is a relation, not of 



1 As I have already argued in Lecture XV. Cf. supra, pp. 285-93. 

2 As Mr. Marett wittily put it, ' It is Trinity basking in a perpetual 
Long Vacation '. 

3 Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 86. 4 Ibid., p. 37. 



392 PLURALISM lect. 

subordination, but of reciprocal dependence.' The Absolute 
is exhaustively expressed in a certain number of such ' fun- 
damental differentiations ', and is thus ' a system of indi- 
viduals of which each is conscious of the other '; and such 
a system, he contends, cannot be accused of ' atomism ', 
for it is ' bound together by the mutual knowledge of its 
parts '. 1 

The Idealism which Dr. McTaggart professes is defined 
by himself, almost in Berkeley's words, as the doctrine 
' that nothing can exist but persons — conscious beings who 
know, will, and feel '. 2 The position is open, therefore, to 
the general objections which have been brought against 
Monadism and Mentalism. But special difficulties are 
created for Dr. McTaggart's variety of the theory by the 
absence of any central Monad or Monas Monadum; for 
there appears to be no self in this ' harmonious system of 
selves ' 3 which knows all the other selves. How then do we 
know that they form a harmonious system? Can we, 
indeed, reasonably speak of system or harmony at all except 
in view of some mind for which it exists? And again, the 
ordinary way in which subjective idealism meets the scien- 
tific difficulties as to the existence of things unperceived or 
completely unknown by any finite spirit — namely, by at- 
tributing to them an existence for an eternal and omnis- 
cient Spirit — is not open to Dr. McTaggart, whose uni- 
verse accordingly dissolves into a number of fragmentary 
subjective worlds with no provision for their co-ordination 
and no guarantee that, if pieced together, the result would 
be a coherent whole. 4 Dr. McTaggart admits that, if his 
theory is to work, ' it would seem to follow that every self 
must be in complete and conscious harmony with the whole 

1 Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 62. 

2 Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 251. 
8 Ibid., p. 248. 

4 Dr. Rashdall has urged these difficulties. Cf. Philosophy and Re- 
ligion, pp. 123-6, and Mind, N. S., vol. xv, pp. 542-6. 



xx ETERNAL AND PERFECT SELVES 393 

of the universe V and he admits likewise that this is not in 
accordance with the facts as known to us. But he is equal 
to the emergency, for the difficulty disappears if we assume 
that all selves are perfect; and that, he says, would seem to 
be ' our proper conclusion \ 2 ' If an opponent should 
remind me of the notorious imperfections in the present 
lives of each of us, I should point out that every self is . . . 
in reality eternal, and that its true qualities are only seen 
in so far as it is considered as eternal. Sub specie aeternita- 
fis, every self is perfect. Sub specie temporis, it is progress- 
ing towards a perfection as yet unattained/ 3 This conclu- 
sion was no doubt inevitable, seeing that each self was 
already defined as an Absolute. 4 But such a heroic multi- 
plication of deities appeals to me rather as a reductio ad ab- 
surdnm of Dr. McTaggart's doctrine of eternal substances 
than as calling for further discussion. I doubt if individ- 
ualism has ever been carried further than in this proposal to 
have as many universals as there are particulars. 

But Pluralism is chiefly associated, in recent discussion, 
with the name of William James. He has made himself 
the spokesman of the tendency in a special volume of 
lectures; but all through his work we trace the same reaction 
against ' monism ' or ' rationalism ' and its ' block-universe '. 
And with James, as we have already partly seen, the 
Pluralism is uncompromising; it means a 'finite God ' and 
an ' unfinished world \ He agrees, accordingly, with the 
writers we have just considered in distinguishing sharply 
between God and the Absolute, and he invokes the ordinary 
religious consciousness in support of his position. ' " God " 
in the religious life of ordinary men is the name not of the 

1 Hegelian Cosmology, p. 34. 2 Ibid., p. 35, 

3 Mind, X. S., vol. xi, p. 388 (in a review of Professor Howison's 
Limits of Evolution) . 

4 Descartes had already indicated the conclusion : ' If I were myself 
the author of my being, anything else would have been easy in compari- 
son ; I should have bestowed on myself every perfection of which I 
possess the idea, and I should thus be God' (Meditations, iii). 



394 PLURALISM lect. 

whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency 
in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us 
to co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they 
are worthy. He works in an external environment, has 
limits and has enemies.' x And again, ' Monotheism itself, 
so far as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room 
instruction for the metaphysician, has always viewed God 
as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all 
the shapers of the great world's fate \ 2 

James's view is thus the expression of his intense con- 
viction of the reality of the moral struggle, taken together 
with the conception he has formed of the Absolute as mak- 
ing that struggle unmeaning, and as being in fact ' the 
great de-realiser of the only life we are at home in \ 3 
Hence he transfers the moralistic attitude to the universe as 
a whole ; the course of the world appeals to him as a struggle 
in which the forces of reason and goodness are at grips with 
Chaos and old Night. One need only recall the well-known 
close of the essay ' Is Life worth Living? ' : ' If this life be 
not a real fight in which something is eternally gained for 
the universe by success, it is no better than a game of 
private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. 
But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something 
really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities 
and faithfulnesses, are indeed to redeem. . . . God himself, 
in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being 
from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what 
the sweat and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean any- 
thing short of this.' 4 Hence he offers us as a philosophical 
and religious creed the doctrine of ' meliorism ' or ' melior- 
istic theism ', as a mean ' between the two extremes of 
crude Naturalism on the one hand and transcendental 
Absolutism on the other ' ; between pessimism and an op- 

X A Pluralistic Universe, -p. 124. 2 Pragmatism, p. 298. 

*A Pluralistic Universe, p. 49. * The Will to Believe, p. 61. 



xx JAMES'S ' MORALISTIC ' UNIVERSE 395 

timism ' too saccharine ', * too idyllic ' for his taste. The 
world we know is a ' moralistic and epic kind of universe ', 
the hall-mark of which is progress through effort. Ab- 
solutism alone, he admits, can give a sense of security, an 
assurance, that is to say, of the eventual, or rather of the 
eternal, triumph of good. But James finds himself ' willing 
to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous ', 
1 a universe with only a fighting chance of safety V * The 
ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the 
world conditional upon the success with which each unit 
does its part.' 2 

There is no denying the stirring quality of Professor 
James's philosophy and the appeal it makes to our active 
nature. But can we hope to find in the characteristics of 
our own practical activity a description in ultimate terms 
of the fundamental nature of the universe? James began 
by appealing to religious usage in support of his view of 
a struggling deity and a progressing world. But ' moral- 
istic ', as we find, is the epithet which he tends on the 
whole to associate with his doctrine of Meliorism; and 
he admits that ' many persons would refuse to call the 
pluralistic scheme religious at all ', reserving that word for 
the monistic scheme alone. 3. He speaks himself in this 
sense of ' religious optimism ', and of taking sides for his 
own part with the ' more moralistic view ', and again he 
describes his position as ' moralistic religion \ 4 Now it 
has been rightly said that a philosophy may be ultimately 
tested by its ability ' to reconcile the attitudes and postu- 
lates of morality and religion ' ; but it is almost a philo- 
sophical commonplace that the attitudes and postulates in 
the two cases are not the same. However it may be with 
popular religion, the deeper expressions of religious faith 

1 Pragmatism, chap. viii. 

2 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 526. 

s Pragmatism, p. 293. * Ibid., pp. 295-6, 301. 



396 PLURALISM lect. 

and emotion — the utterances of the saints, the religious 
experts — appear quite irreconcilable with the pluralistic 
conception of a finite God, an unfinished world and a dubious 
fight. In fact, it is not too much to say, with Mr. Bradley, 
that ' to make the moral point of view absolute ' is to have 
1 broken with every considerable religion V The victory 
for which morality fights is for religion already, or rather 
eternally, won; and it is the assurance of this victory which 
inspires the finite subject with courage and confidence in 
his individual struggle. For it is a significant fact that the 
apparent contradiction between the two standpoints, on 
which James enlarges in his attacks on monism, is a prod- 
uct of philosophical reflection, and does not exist for the 
religious man himself. On the contrary, as experience 
abundantly shows, the assurance of victory won and recon- 
ciliation achieved is the most powerful dynamic that can be 
supplied to morality. 

It may be, as James often suggests, that there are other 
than merely logical considerations involved in the decision 
between monism and pluralism. In an intellectual aspect, 
it is the alternative between the idea of a system and the 
idea of an aggregate, and I confess that I find it impossible 
to reduce the universe to a mere ' and '. Moreover, if it 
were possible to think of the universe as a collocation of 
independent facts existing each in its own right, a sheer 
materialism would seem the most natural form for such 
a view to take. To conceive a Being of transcendent 
intelligence and goodness as no more than one of the facts 
in the universe, seems to make it harder than ever to think 
of other facts as just happening to be there along with him 
— just happening to exist also, and getting in his way 
actively or passively. Admit intelligence or an ideal factor 
at all, and it seems impossible to conceive it otherwise than 
as central and all-explaining. It appears to me trifling with 
1 Appearance and Reality, p. 500. 



xx THE ABSOLUTE DREAMER 397 

one's intellect to make a fancy-picture of the universe as 
a casual collection of independent items. That anything 
should exist at all, it has been said, is an unfathomable 
mystery. Perhaps on that account it seems impossible to 
think of what exists otherwise than as a single whole, refer- 
able in all its parts to a single principle. And as Beauty 
has been called its own excuse for being, so intelligence or 
Mind, of which beauty is one expression, may be said in a 
larger sense to furnish its own raison d'etre. 

Moreover, a Pluralism like James's, put forward avowedly 
as an assertion of the reality of finite experience, may be 
shown to be in great part due to the pre-conceived idea of 
the Absolute from which it is the reaction. There is no 
doubt much excuse for that idea in the statements of 
idealists, but it is nevertheless erroneous. The Absolute is 
conceived by James from beginning to end of his polemic 
as purely cognitive, not the doer and sufferer in the world's 
life, but an eternally perfect spectator of the play. Finite 
beings are always represented, therefore, as the objects of 
the Absolute. ' To be, on this scheme ', he says, ' is, on the 
part of a finite thing, to be an object for the Absolute, and 
on the part of the Absolute it is to be the thinker of that 
assemblage of objects.' The All-knower is one of his most 
frequent terms for the Absolute. The absolute mind 
* makes the partial facts by thinking them, just as we make 
objects in a dream by dreaming them, or personages in 
a story by imagining them \ x All through the volume, 
A Pluralistic Universe, we have this analogy of the dream 
or the story repeated. We hear of ' the cosmic novel ', 
' the tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect ', ' the 
spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the absolute ', 
1 the sort of world which the absolute was pleased to offer 
to itself as a spectacle '. 2 And there is a significant passage 
in which, with the truer view in sight, he deliberately rejects 
l A Pluralistic Universe, p. 36. 2 Ibid., pp. 48, 49, 118, 126. 



398 PLURALISM lect. 

it, and reaffirms his own pre-conceived idea of what the 
Absolute must be. A critic is supposed to suggest that we, 
as finite minds, are ' constituents ' of the Absolute, that it 
lives in our life and cannot live without us; but James 
retorts that this is * employing pluralistic weapons and 
thereby giving up the absolutist case '. ' The Absolute as 
such ', he reiterates, ' has objects, not constituents.' * That 
being so, we have the familiar contrast between ' the static 
timeless perfect Absolute ' and the moving world of real 
events, or between ' the stagnant felicity ' of the absolute 
novel-reader and the stress and strain (not to mention worse 
things) endured by those who are personages in the plot. 
Or, stretching the metaphor a little, he asks why, if the 
spectacle offered to itself by the Absolute is in the Absolute's 
eyes perfect, should the affair not remain on just those terms, 
without having any finite spectators to come in and add to 
what is perfect already their innumerable imperfect manners 
of seeing the same spectacle. Why, in short, ' should 
the Absolute ever have lapsed from the perfection of its own 
integral experience of things and refracted itself into all 
our finite experiences? ' 2 

The metaphor, as I say, is halting, but the question repeats 
the old difficulty which we discussed in connexion with the 
idea of creation — the question why there is a finite world at 
all, why God or the Idea ever issued from its antemun- 
dane self-sufficiency. And we set the question aside as 
based on an unjustifiable substantiation of God apart from 
the world of his manifestation — a substantiation for 
which, in the nature of the case, no evidence can be forth- 
coming. James's Absolute is just such a self-contained 
Person who, apparently out of his mere good pleasure, 
gives himself the spectacle of the cosmic drama — as it 
were pour se distraire ou pour passer le temps. It is re- 
garded at any rate as enhancing his felicity. Now I am 
1 A Pluralistic Universe, p. 123. 2 Ibid., pp. 118-20. 



xx A FALSE IDEA OF PERFECTION 399 

far from denying that chapter and verse might be quoted 
from absolutist as well as theistic writers in support of this 
inhuman conception : one need not go further, indeed, 
than Mr. Bradley's speculation about the Absolute enjoy- 
ing the balance of pleasure distilled, as it were, from the 
delights and agonies of finite agents, to find some justifi- 
cation for James's way of putting things. And we saw Mr. 
Bradley also at a loss to know ' why the Absolute divides 
itself into finite centres ', seeing that in its ' single and all- 
absorbing experience ' they entirely cease to exist as such. 
This, as I have pointed out, is only one of two currents of 
thought in Mr. Bradley's philosophical work; but it was 
the aloofness — the in-itselfness, as we might call it — of 
his Absolute, which made the stronger impression on con- 
temporary thought. And just this feature is shared by 
the Absolute with the ordinary theological idea of God — the 
idea of a God without a universe, a pre-existent, self-cen- 
tred, and absolutely self-sufficient Being, eternally realizing 
a bliss ineffable in the contemplation of his own perfec- 
tion. No wonder that there seems no passage from such a 
Being to the imperfect world of our experience. But the 
analysis we undertook, in two previous lectures, of the 
ideas of creation and purpose applied to the universe as a 
whole led us definitely to abandon this conception of the 
divine; and I suggested that many of our difficulties are 
created for us by the abstract idea of perfection with which 
we start. To reach any credible theory of the relation of 
God and man we must, in fact, profoundly transform the 
traditional idea of God. 

Orthodox theism is defined by Professor Flint * as ' the 
doctrine that the universe owes its existence and its con- 
tinuance in existence to the reason and will of a self-existent 
Being, who is infinitely powerful, wise and good '. But 
1 Theism, p. 18 (eighth edition). 



400 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

this world of ours, so scarred by suffering, so defaced by 
wickedness, so entangled, as it often seems, in the meshes of 
a non-rational contingency — how dare we trace such a world 
to the reason and will of a perfect Being as its sole ex- 
plaining cause ? Here Pluralism, in one or other of its many 
forms, is so obviously, on the surface, what James calls it, 
the line of least resistance, that one can hardly wonder at 
the welcome it receives. God is truly good, said Plato, and 
cannot be the cause of any evil. But what then of these 
sinister and disconcerting features? Here are the ultimate 
difficulties of a theistic monism. When the problem is 
forced upon us, Plato goes on to say, we must find out a 
theory to save the situation. In the case of suffering, for 
example, we must say that what God did was righteous and 
good, and that the sufferers were chastened for their profit. 1 
From the days of Job and his comforters, the devising of 
such theodicies — theories to save the situation — has been the 
main business of theology and theological metaphysics. 
Plato himself, as we incidentally saw, 2 has his own way of 
escape from the difficulty; and it consists essentially in sav- 
ing goodness at the expense of omnipotence. ' We must be 
prepared to deny that God is the cause of all things ', he 
tells us in the same context ; * what is good we must ascribe 
to no other than God, but we must seek elsewhere, and not 
in him, the causes of what is evil.' Put in metaphysical 
terms, this means that our explanation of the course of the 
world must take account, not only of a divine intelligence 
and goodness, but also of the clogging and thwarting agency 
of the material in which the divine Idea seeks embodiment. 
But this is to ascribe to matter an independent and co- 
eternal reality, and thus to set a principle of unreason along- 
side of or over-against the purposive action of reason rep- 
resented by the Idea of the Good. Greek thought, on the 
whole, represents the divine action in this way, as that of 
1 Republic, 379,380. 2 Cf. supra, pp. 305-6. 



xx THE GREEK SOLUTION 401 

an artificer limited by the qualities of his material, and 
consequently surrenders the idea of the universe as a perfect 
and coherent whole — the active manifestation of a single 
principle. This way of escape is not open to ordinary 
theism, which represents God as creator in the fullest sense ; 
and it is of course repudiated by Absolutism, which is pre- 
cisely the assertion of a perfect and coherent whole. But 
the empirical facts are so hard to reconcile with such a thesis, 
that, in one direction or another, the need is felt to qualify 
the idea of absolute or abstract omnipotence by the recog- 
nition of limiting conditions. 

If we turn once more to Hume, with whom these 
lectures began, we find the dualistic or Manichaean 
hypothesis of two warring principles of good and evil, 
which is readily suggested by the phenomena of the moral 
world, conclusively dismissed as inconsistent with ' the 
uniformity and steadiness of general laws '. But Hume 
makes Cleanthes grasp at the idea of a finite deity as a way 
out of the difficulties. ' Supposing the Author of Nature to 
be finitely perfect, though far exceeding mankind, a satis- 
factory account may then be given of natural and moral 
evil, and every untoward phenomenon be explained and 
adjusted. A less evil may then be chosen, in order to avoid 
a greater ; inconveniences be submitted to, in order to reach 
a desirable end; and, in a word, benevolence, regulated by 
wisdom and limited by necessity, may produce just such a 
world as the present.' * But although Philo is invited, with 
something like real eagerness, to give his opinion of ' this 
new theory \ the suggestion is not developed in the sequel 
of the Dialogues, and perhaps Hume means us to under- 
stand that he regards it also as inconsistent with the power- 
ful impression of unity which the universe produces. It is, 
however, as is well known, the position adopted by J. S. Mill 
in his posthumous Essays on Religion. Omnipotence is dis- 
1 Dialogues, Part XI. 



402 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

missed by Mill on account of the impossibility of ' reconcil- 
ing infinite benevolence and justice with infinite power in the 
Creator of such a world as this \ The limitation of power 
he considers to be most probably due to the qualities of the 
material with which he had to deal ; for ' there is in nature 
no reason whatever to suppose that either matter or force 
or any of their properties were made by the Being who was 
the author of the collocations by which the world is adapted 
to what we consider its purposes; or that he has power to 
alter any of those properties \ ' If [then] we suppose limi- 
tation of power, there is nothing to contradict the supposi- 
tion of perfect knowledge and absolute wisdom. . . . But 
nothing obliges us to suppose that either the knowledge or 
the .-skill is infinite \ Similarly of the moral attributes : 

* Grant that creative power was limited by conditions, the 
nature and extent of which are wholly unknown to us, and 
the goodness and justice of the Creator may be all that the 
most pious believe.' But if we look simply at the general 
indications of the evidence available, we find that the greater 
part of the adaptation in nature is not directed to a moral 
end at all, but simply to keep the living machine going. 
Still, a certain balance of evidence remains in favour of a 
' benevolent purpose ' ; ' it does appear that, granting the 
existence of design, there is a preponderance of evidence 
that the Creator desired the pleasure of his creatures '. 

* But to jump from this to the inference that his sole or chief 
purposes are those of benevolence, and that the single end 
and aim of creation was the happiness of his creatures, is 
not only not justified by any evidence, but is a conclusion in 
opposition to such evidence as we have. If the motive of 
the Deity for creating sentient beings was the happiness of 
the beings he created, his purpose, in our corner of the uni- 
verse at least, must be pronounced, taking past ages and all 
countries and races into account, to have been thus far an 
ignominious failure; and if God had no purpose but our 



xx HUME AND MILL 403 

happiness and that of other living creatures, it is not credible 
that he would have called them into existence with the 
prospect of being so completely baffled.' 

The two points that stand out in these arguments — and 
the arguments may be taken as typical — are, in the first 
place, the stress laid on the idea of omnipotence, and 
secondly, the purely hedonistic character of the ideal con- 
templated. The conception of omnipotence has been much 
abused by controversialists. Mere power is, in any case, 
the earliest and crudest predicate of the divine; God is 
conceived as the All-powerful long before he is thought of 
as the All-good. The ethical attributes of justice and benevo- 
lence are not, in fact, transferred to the deity till man him- 
self has grasped the moral concepts in their purity, and risen 
to the idea of a cosmic law of right and wrong and a will 
untouched by envy or malevolence. Moreover, by primitive 
thought power is inevitably conceived in terms of physical 
force; and so the power of the god is simply the irresistible 
force with which he crushes opposition and condignly 
punishes the disobedient. 1 His will, in the absence of any 
ethical content, is the abstraction of empty or arbitrary will, 
as such. It is the will of a despot. And we must remember 
how closely the associations of oriental monarchy have 
wound themselves round the God-idea. The popular use of 
' the Almighty ', as an appellation of the Divine Being, may 
be said, with some truth, to perpetuate the pretensions of 
these potentates and the flatteries of their helpless subjects. 
In itself, the predicate completely lacks the element of value, 
for it simply means able to do anything. The philosophical 
and theological discussion about omnipotence has its origin 

1 Even after the deity has come to be conceived as the executor of the 
moral law, the same idea of the divine power is found persisting, e. g. 
in Locke's account of ' the- true ground of morality' as being 'the will 
and law of a God who sees men in the dark, has in his hands rewards 
and punishments, and power enough to call to account the proudest 
offender' (Essay, I. 3. 6). 



404 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

in the same circle of ideas; and just as Canute's flatterers 
sought to persuade him that he could command the oncoming 
waves, so some writers, with more zeal than knowledge, 
have thought to exalt the divine prerogative by representing 
both truth and morality as dependent, in their structure, on 
the arbitrary fiat of God, and by asserting his power to 
compass intellectual and moral contradictions. And, even 
in our own day, Dr. McTaggart has thought it worth his 
while to devote some twenty pages to the barren argument 
that God is not omnipotent, because He cannot override 
the laws of Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded Middle, 
and similar necessities of thought or action. 1 But to affirm 
omnipotence in such a sense is unmeaning, and therefore to 
deny it is unnecessary. Omnipotence can only mean — as I 
find it expressed in a recent Catholic manual — the power 
* to effect whatever is not intrinsically impossible '. The 
intrinsic necessities which govern the possibilities are not, 
because they are called intrinsic, to be regarded as a meta- 
physical fate behind God, or an impersonal system of 
' eternal truths ' to which He is forced to submit. The 
foundations of the intelligible universe are the necessities 
of the divine nature itself; and to separate God's Being, as 
Power or Will, from his Nature is the ultimate form of 
that apotheosis of the empty Ego which we have already 
repeatedly condemned. This has long been recognized by 
responsible thinkers, theologians as well as philosophers, in 
regard to the fundamental conditions of intellectual co- 
herence; but there is not always the same clearness as 
regards the conditions of moral experience, although these 
are as inexorable as any law of thought and no less founded 
in the nature of things. 

The failure to realize the fundamental presuppositions of 
the moral life is strikingly exemplified in the sequel of Mill's 
argument. For he goes on to comment on the fact that 
1 Some Dogmas of Religion, p. 202 et seq. 



xx THE CONCEPTION OF OMNIPOTENCE 405 

man, ' by the exercise of his own energies for the improve- 
ment both of himself and of his outward circumstances ', has 
' the power to do for himself and other creatures vastly more 
than God had in the first instance done '. And his comment 
is that it is ' a very strange supposition to make concerning 
the Deity ... to suppose that he could not in the first 
instance create anything better than a Bosjesman or an 
Andaman islander, or something still lower, and yet was able 
to endow the Bosjesman or the Andaman islander with the 
power of raising himself into a Newton or a Fenelon '. 
' We certainly do not know the nature of the barriers which 
limit the divine omnipotence ', he concludes, ' but it is a very 
odd notion of them that they enable the Deity to confer on 
an almost bestial creature the power of producing by a suc- 
cession of efforts what God himself had no other means of 
creating.' An honest controversialist will admit the dark 
features of the long-drawn-out process — its severity and 
apparent wastefulness — features which sometimes appear 
to us intolerable ; but as regards the general principle, how 
(we may reply to Mill) can we conceive a moral being to be 
created at all except by allowing him to make himself in 
the stress of circumstance and temptation? And the same 
thing holds of the intellectual process : how but by ceaseless 
effort and the conquest of difficulties can the thews of the 
mind be developed and strengthened ? Mill's notion of out- 
right creation — everything done by God ' in the first in- 
stance ' — might give us a world of automata receiving their 
daily doles of pleasure, but it could give us neither the minds 
nor the characters we know. 

The thought underlying such passages recalls us, there- 
fore, to the second feature which we noted as common to the 
arguments of Hume and Mill, the curious inability of both 
to see beyond a purely hedonistic ideal. It is striking, when 
one returns upon Hume's discussion of theism, to find how 
completely the argument moves upon hedonistic ground — 



406 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

the ' misery ' of man as inconsistent with the ' benevolence ' 
of God. ' Why is there any misery at all in the world? ' 
Hume asks ; why did God not ' render the whole world 
happy', seeing that he is supposed to have the power to do 
so? Or again: ' The course of nature tends not to human 
or animal felicity, therefore it is not established for that 
purpose. ... In what respect, then, do [God's] benevo- 
lence and mercy resemble the benevolence and mercy of 
men ? ' 1 This is put forward as clinching the argument. 
The felicity of his creatures being apparently the only con- 
ceivable object of a benevolent creator, the existence of suf- 
fering makes it impossible to believe in the benevolence. And 
this is almost more strongly marked in the parallel discus- 
sion by Mill. Evidence for ' a benevolent purpose ' is, for 
Mill also, ' evidence that the Creator desired the pleasure of 
his creatures '. But, as we have just seen, effort, difficulty, 
hardship, pain, seem to be involved in any kind of moral 
world which we can really conceive, or in any world which 
is really worth having; and the end of such a world would 
seem to be, by the operation of such factors, ' the making of 
souls,' something very different from ' the human and 
animal felicity ' which Hume's ' bon Dieu ' is supposed to 
aim at. Terms like pleasure, felicity, even happiness, keep 
us at the level of individual and quasi-passive enjoyment. 
To be true to the highest and deepest experiences of life, we 
must substitute some larger term like satisfaction — for satis- 
faction, of course, there must be, even in the completest sac- 
rifice of self. But though we may possibly feel it not inap- 
propriate to speak of such satisfaction as happiness, we 
should not dream of calling it pleasure. Need I do more 
than recall the well-known passage at the close of Romola? 
* We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along 
with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much 
feeling for the rest of the world as well as for ourselves; 
1 Dialogues, Parts X and XI. 



xx A PURELY HEDONISTIC IDEAL 407 

and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, 
that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we 
should choose before anything else, because our souls see it 
is good.' The universe is not perfect in the sense that it 
contains nothing but undiluted enjoyment. We degrade it 
to a child's paradise in so conceiving it. It is not perfect in the 
sense that there is no evil in it; for it is equally childish to 
imagine that good can exist for a finite creature except as 
the conquest of evil. 1 Self-contradictory and thoughtless 
ideals blind us to the nature of reality. We have spoken 
much in the earlier lectures of the reality of ideals, as the 
presence of the infinite in our finite lives, carrying us beyond 
the ' is ' of actual achievement. But the ideals that are true 
and fruitful are struck out, or become obvious, in the stress 
of actual experience, and are only the fundamental structure 
of reality coming to fuller expression. 

What, then, is the conception of God to which our argu- 
ment finally points? More than once the conclusion has 
been forced upon us that, if we are to reach any credible 
theory of the relations of God and man, the traditional idea 
of God must be profoundly transformed. The direction 
which that transformation should take must now be fairly 
obvious. The traditional idea, to a large extent an inherit- 
ance of philosophy from theology, may be not unfairly 
described as a fusion of the primitive monarchical ideal with 
Aristotle's conception of the Eternal Thinker. The two 
conceptions thus fused are, of course, very different; for 
power, which is the main constituent of the former, has, in 
the ordinary sense, no place at all in Aristotle's speculative 
ideal. But there is common to both the idea of a self-cen- 

1 It seems strange to find Dr. Rashdall saying in a recent essay on 
1 The Problem of Evil ' : ' We see how individual character is tried and 
strengthened by the struggle with temptation and difficulty, with evil 
within and evil without. But why there should be this conditioning of 
good by evil we cannot say ' {The Faith and the War, p. 99). The italics 
are mine. 



4 o8 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

tred life and a consequent aloofness from the world. Prim- 
itive man was inured to an arbitrary despotism which uses 
power for selfish aggrandizement and luxury, and sees in the 
subject populations only the instruments of its own pomp 
and glory; and the attitude of the Oriental ruler to his people 
is half-unconsciously transferred by the worshipper to his 
god. And although the relationship became purged in time 
of its baser features, and might be characterized, as in the 
case of Israel and Jahve, by a singular intimacy and depth of 
feeling, still the conception of God remains that of a purely 
transcendent Being, whose own life is not involved in the 
fortunes of mankind. ' God is good to Israel,' and his 
' graciousness ' is often recorded; but his graciousness still 
resembles the condescension of a prince from his own 
princely sphere, an act of kindness which costs him nothing. 
And the purely intellectual character of Aristotle's ideal 
gives it the same aloofness we have noted from the world's 
life. It is the ideal of the scholar and thinker who retires 
into his own thoughts, and finds there his highest happiness. 
The life of God, Aristotle says, ' is like the highest kind of 
activity with us, but while we can maintain it but a short 
time, with him it is eternal ' ; and as all unimpeded function 
is accompanied by pleasure, so, in this unbroken activity of 
contemplative thought, God realizes a supreme and eternal 
blessedness. Standing outside of the process, Aristotle's 
God is the world's ideal; he is said to move the world, as 
the object of the world's desire. But how much is left out 
of such a conception! The world strains after God in love 
and longing, but there is no word of that prior love of God 
to the world which is the condition of finite love and aspi- 
ration. ' We love him because he first loved us.' In his 
account of the relation of the world to God, it has been said : 
' Aristotle seems always to move upward and not down- 
wards. He seems always to be showing that the finite world 
cannot be conceived to be complete and independent, and that 



xx TRADITIONAL THEISM 409 

its existence therefore must be referred back to God ; but not 
that in the nature of God, as he describes it, there is any ne- 
cessity or reason for the existence of the world.' l ' The 
time had not yet come ', says Erdmann, ' when God would 
be known as the God that took on himself novo?, labour, 
without which the life of God were one of heartless ease, 
troubled with nothing, while with it alone he is Love and 
Creator.' 2 

Both these writers point to the deeper view of the nature 
of God contained in the Christian doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion. But it must be confessed that the speculative truth 
expressed in the central doctrine of the new religion has 
seldom been taken seriously — taken in bitter earnest — either 
in Christian theology or in the metaphysical idealism which 
has grown up under the same influences. The God of pop- 
ular Christian theology is still the far-off, self-involved, 
abstractly perfect and eternally blessed God of pure Mono- 
theism, inherited instincts combining with the potent in- 
fluence of Greek philosophy to stifle what was most 
characteristic in the world-view of the new faith. Few 
things are more disheartening to the philosophical student of 
religion than the way in which the implications of the doc- 
trine of the Incarnation are evaded in popular theology by 
dividing the functions of Deity between the Father and the 
Son, conceived practically as two distinct personalities or 
centres of consciousness, the Father perpetuating the old 
monarchical ideal and the incarnation of the Son being 
limited to a single historical individual. 2 Grosser still, how- 

1 Edward Caird, Theology in the Greek Philosophers, vol. ii, p. 13. 

2 Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophic, section 87. 

3 In revising these lectures I have been pleased to find strong support 
for the view here expressed in a suggestive paper by Dr. Streeter, ' The 
Suffering of God' (Hibbert Journal, April 1914). Dr. Streeter points 
out that, although the formula of Athanasius was embodied in the 
creeds, ' so far as the imagination of the Church is concerned it has 
really been the Arian who has triumphed '. Hebrew and Greek tradi- 
tion combined in representing God as transcendent and impassible, and 



410 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

ever, is the materialism which has succeeded in transforming 
the profound doctrine of the Spirit, as the ultimate expres- 
sion of the unity and communion of God and man, into the 
notion of another distinct Being, a third centre of conscious- 
ness mysteriously united with the other two. The accidents 
of language have combined with the ingrained materialism 
of our ordinary thinking to make the doctrine of the Trinity 
a supra-rational mystery concerning the inner constitution 
of a transcendent Godhead, instead of the profoundest, and 
therefore the most intelligible, attempt to express the in- 
dwelling of God in man. 

What was the secret of Christianity, the new interpreta- 
tion of life by which it conquered the world ? The answer is 
in a sense a commonplace. It was the lesson of self-sacri- 
fice, of life for others, precisely through which, nevertheless, 
the truest and intensest realization of the self was to be at- 
tained — in the Pauline phrase, dying to live, in the words 
of Jesus, losing one's life to find it. This is the heavenly 
wisdom, which commanded the homage even of the self- 
centred Goethe : 

Und so lang du das nicht hast, 
Dieses : Stirb und werde, 
Bist du nur ein triiber Gast 
Auf der dunklen Erde. 

This conception of the meaning of life, embodied in the 
figure of One who spoke of Himself as being among men as 

accordingly ' the doctrine of the impassibility of God became a postulate 
of theology. . . . Men still spoke of the love of God : they only really 
meant it when they thought of God the Son ; clemency at most — a royal 
prerogative — was imagined of the Father. . . '. The Christian Creed 
acknowledges but one God and one quality of Godhead — so far Atha- 
nasius won his cause ; but the Christian imagination has been driven by 
this postulate of the impassibility of God to worship two. Side by side 
sit throned in heaven God the Father, omnipotent, unchangeable, impas- 
sible, and on his right hand God the Son, " passus, crucifixus, mortuus, 
resurrectus". What is this but Arianism, routed in the field of intellec- 
tual definition, triumphing in the more important sphere of the imagi- 
native presentation of the object of the belief?' 



xx THE SECRET OF CHRISTIANITY 411 

one that serveth, this was the victory which overcame the 
world. It is the final abandonment of the hedonistic ideal, 
through the recognition of the inherent emptiness of the 
self-centred life. The whole standard of judgement upon 
life and the purpose of the world is accordingly changed. 
And here the bearing of the change upon our argument 
becomes apparent. 

For if this is the deepest insight into human life, must we 
not also recognize it as the open secret of the universe? 
That is the conclusion to which we have been led up more 
than once already in the course of these lectures : no God, 
or Absolute, existing in solitary bliss and perfection, but a 
God who lives in the perpetual giving of himself, who 
shares the life of his finite creatures, bearing in and with 
them the whole burden of their finitude, their sinful wander- 
ings and sorrows, and the suffering without which they can- 
not be made perfect. It is the fundamental structure of 
reality which we are seeking to determine. For that surely 
is the meaning of all discussion as to the being and nature 
of God. In this ultimate instance, therefore, we cannot 
expect to gain an insight into that structure by passing 
altogether from the process of the finite life, treating it 
simply as an illusion, and defining Reality, in contrast with 
it, as the perpetual undimmed enjoyment of a static per- 
fection. To do so would be to abandon the principle which 
has guided us throughout. We must interpret the divine 
on the analogy of what we feel to be profoundest in our 
own experience. And if so, the omnipotence of God will 
mean neither the tawdry trappings of regal pomp nor the 
irresistible might of a physical force. The divine om- 
nipotence consists in the all-compelling power of good- 
ness and love to enlighten the grossest darkness and 
to melt the hardest heart. ' We needs must love the 
highest when we see it.' It is of the essence of the 
divine prerogative to seek no other means of triumph — 



4 i2 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

as, indeed, a real triumph is possible on no other terms. 1 
And thus, for a metaphysic which has emancipated itself 
from physical categories, the ultimate conception of God is 
not that of a pre-existent Creator but, as it is for religion, 
that of the eternal Redeemer of the world. This perpetual 
process is the very life of God, in which, besides the effort 
and the pain, He tastes, we must believe, the joy of victory 
won. 

But although, from the divine point of view, the process 
must be thus envisaged in its completeness as an eternal deed, 
that is not to be taken as implying that we have to do, as 
James suggests, with a spectacular performance, in which 
the conflict is merely a make-believe and the issue a fore- 
gone conclusion. There is a well-known passage of Hegel 
which has always seemed to me to lend colour to such a sug- 
gestion. ' Within the range of the finite ', he says, ' we can 
never see or experience that the End has been really secured. 
The consummation of the infinite End, therefore, consists 
merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet un- 
accomplished. The Good, the absolutely Good, is eternally 
accomplishing itself in the world, and the result is that it 
needs not wait upon us, but is already by implication, as well 
as in full actuality, accomplished. This is the illusion under 
which we live. It alone supplies at the same time the actual- 
izing force on which the interest in the world depends. In 
the course of its process, the Idea creates that illusion by set- 
ting an antithesis to confront itself, and its action consists 
in getting rid of the illusion which it has created.' 2 It will 
be noted that Hegel represents this illusion as the beneficent 
source of our interest in the world and its doings. But can 
we hope to preserve that interest if we admit to ourselves — 

1 This was finely brought out in the passage quoted from Professor 
Howison, supra, p. 319. 

2 Encyclopaedia, section 212, Zusatz (Wallace's translation, p. 352). 
Tduschung is the word used and four times repeated, meaning literally 
a ' deception ' practised by the Idea upon the finite subject. 



xx A PASSAGE OF HEGEL CRITICIZED 413 

even though it be only in our speculative moments — that it 
is all a cleverly arranged deception? The view, as Hegel 
here presents it, seems to me, I confess, to paralyse our 
energies at their source; if the antagonisms of the moral life 
are not real, then we have no standard of reality left. But 
the impression produced by Hegel's passage is due, in part 
at least, to the intrusion of the time-perspective. For if it 
is false to place the divine consummation in the future as 
* one far-off divine event ', it is still more fundamentally 
false, in a practical regard, to represent it as a finished fact 
in the past. All the tenses of time are required to body 
forth the eternal, and if we use them all frankly, we reach 
(we need not doubt) a practical truth. But if we attempt 
a more speculative statement, the statement must be in 
terms of the present. The universe is in no sense a finished 
fact) it is an act, a continuous life or process which (to 
speak in terms of time) is perpetually being accomplished. 1 
Professor Bosanquet has well said of the finite self that ' a 
true self is something to be made and won, to be held 
together with pains and labour, not something given to be 
enjoyed \ 2 The same must be true of the Absolute as the 
perpetual reconstitution and victorious self-maintenance of 
the spiritual whole. But if so, nothing could be more con- 
trary to the true spirit of the situation than to speak of the 
end as already accomplished in the sense that ' it needs not 
wait upon us ' ; for it is in and through finite individuals that 
the divine triumph is worked out, and each of our actions 
and choices is therefore integral to the total result. Such a 
view contains, accordingly, all the strenuousness, the sense 
of uttermost reality in the struggle, on which James rightly 
insists. 

1 Cf. Lecture XIX, supra, pp. 369-70. 

2 Individuality and Value, p. 338. Cf. the words which Goethe puts 
into the mouth of Faust a few moments before his death: 

Nur der verdient die Freiheit wie das Leben, 
Der taglich sie erobern muss. 



414 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

In much the same way as James tends to treat Absolutism 
as a creed for ' the tender-minded ', Nietzsche brands 
Idealism in all its varieties as a ' flight from reality ', a 
species of ' cowardice ' which refuses at any price to see how 
reality is actually constituted. But whatever grounds there 
may be for this suggestion in the facile optimism of some 
idealistic writers, such a charge can hardly be brought 
against the view of God and the world which has been in- 
dicated in the preceding pages. There are features of the 
world-process, I have admitted, so horrible that we often feel 
them to be frankly intolerable. The agonies of helpless suf- 
fering from age to age and the depths of infamy and cruelty 
which the human record discloses — how are facts like these 
to be reconciled with the controlling presence of a principle 
of reason and goodness? Certainly if we attempt the rec- 
onciliation while clinging to the old idea of an omnipotent 
and impassible Creator or an Absolute in the role of spec- 
tator, we shall soon find ourselves exclaiming with James 
that ' a God who can relish such superfluities of horror is 
no God for human beings to appeal to V But the whole 
analogy of a superhuman Person and a carefully adjusted 
scheme is strangely inadequate to the nature of the tremen- 
dous Fact we would explain. Creation, if the term is to be 
used in philosophy, must be taken, we found in a previous 
lecture, as expressing the essential nature of the divine 
life; the revelation of the infinite in the finite is the eternal 
fact of the universe. But the finite world, as centred in 
finite spirits, I have also contended, is not to be regarded as 
a mere appearance, existing only from the finite point of 
view ; it is metaphysically real, as founded in the nature of 
God himself. The usefulness of the term creation consists, 
therefore, in the emphasis it lays on the distinction implied, 
as being more than can be rendered in terms of substance 
and mode. And one may recall in this connexion a phrase 
1 Pragmatism, p. 143. 



xx DOES A WORLD IMPLY CASUALTY? 415 

of Hegel's, riddled by criticism, in which he speaks of the 
Idea ' freely letting itself go ' into the externality of space 
and time and so appearing to itself as Nature. Without 
stirring the ashes of ancient controversies, it is perhaps not 
altogether fanciful to read into the curious phrase some rec- 
ognition of the fact that the ' otherness ' of the finite is not 
a logical transparency, but brings with it a real difference 
and important consequences. 

The existence of a finite world at all seems, in short, to 
involve the clash of individualities which tend to go their 
own way and seek their own ends. And if this involves 
an element of contingency in the world of moral action, the 
same would seem to be true of the world of nature which 
is the theatre of that action. Nature, we argued at an 
earlier stage, may be regarded, on the large scale of history, 
as the instrument of man's moral and intellectual education; 
but that does not mean that we are bound to take each of 
nature's happenings as the exponent of a particular moral 
purpose. The religious man will, no doubt, seek to accept 
whatever happens to him as from the hand of God, and 
by doing so he will make this account of the occurrence 
true, because he thereby transmutes the event into an instru- 
ment of spiritual growth. But the spirit in which he meets 
the experience does not, I think, imply that he traces the 
event, as a natural occurrence, to the operation of a par- 
ticular providence. And it is needless to say that such is 
not the broad impression we derive from the facts of life. 
1 One shall be taken and another left.' Contingency is 
written across the face of nature — not in the sense that what 
happens is not determined by natural law, but in the sense 
that it appears to be only so determined, and cannot, in its 
detail, be brought within the scope of any rational or benef- 
icent purpose. Contingency, casualty, or accident in this 
sense was frankly recognized by Plato and Aristotle, the great 
ideologists of the ancient world. But whereas they treat it 



416 EVIL AND SUFFERING lect. 

merely as hindrance and defect, does not further reflection 
show that just such a world is better fitted to be a nurse of 
what is greatest in human character than any carefully 
adjusted scheme of moral discipline? Nature is more than 
a training-school of the moral virtues in the specific sense; 
it is an element, savage and dangerous, into which the human 
being is thrown to show what stuff he is made of — an 
element testing with merciless severity his powers of courage 
and endurance, but drawing from him thereby the utmost 
of which he is capable. Life for the individual in such 
a medium is a series of opportunities, but the use he makes 
of them depends on himself. 

It comes upon us at first with something of a shock to 
find Professor Bosanquet referring to this process of the 
moulding of souls as 'the chapter of accidents'; 1 yet 
that common phrase correctly enough describes the aspect 
of contingency in detail which seems to belong to any 
finite world that is more than an illusion. The contingence 
is, in the deepest view, contributory to — or rather an 
essential condition of — the perfection of the whole, but it 
wears the appearance of a foreign element in which, and in 
spite of which, the divine purpose is worked out; and it 
carries with it dangerous possibilities — extremities of 
wickedness and of suffering, which it would be hard indeed 
to justify, if we considered them as specific parts of a delib- 
erate plan. It is undoubtedly a source of ' the arduousness 
of reality ', but in the arduousness is rooted most of the 
grandeur of the world. And if we complain of the severity 
of the process, we constantly forget, as Professor Bosanquet 
urges, that ' if we had our choice of pains, we should rule 
out our own greatest opportunities \ 2 The sequel may show 
the experience in question as the very gate through 

1 e. g. Value and Destiny, pp. 225, 228, but the idea runs through his 
two volumes. 

2 Ibid., p. 181. 



xx THE OMNIPOTENCE OF LOVE 417 

which we passed to a nobler life. And every day brings us 
instances of 



Sorrow that is not sorrow but delight, 
And miserable love that is not pain 
To hear of, for the glory that redounds 
Therefrom to human kind and what we are. 

No deeper foundation of Idealism can be laid than the 
perception which Professor Royce makes the text of his 
latest book — the perception of the spirit's power to trans- 
form the very meaning of the past and to transmute every 
loss into a gain, ' finding even in the worst of tragedies the 
means of an otherwise impossible triumph,' 1 a triumph 
which but for that wrong or treason had never been. This 
is the real omnipotence of atoning love, unweariedly creating 
good out of evil; and it is no far-off theological mystery 
but, God be thanked, the very texture of our human 
experience. 

1 The Problem of Christianity, vol. i, p. 310. 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

NOTE A. PAN-PSYCHISM 

Mr. C. A. Richardson, an able pupil of Professor Ward's, 
has challenged my criticisms of Pan-psychism in an article 
in Mind for January 1919, since reprinted in his volume, 
Spiritual Pluralism and Recent Philosophy. He seeks to in- 
validate the objection (urged also by Professor Bosanquet) 
that internality is impossible without externality, and that it 
is in fact as externalities and not as selves that material 
objects function in our experience, by drawing a distinction 
between the immediate data of perception and the existent 
entities of which these * sense-data ' are the * appearance ' or 
* presentation \ * For pluralism the object of experience does 
not consist of other subjects but of the appearance of those 
other subjects to the individual subject considered/ ' An 
existent entity cannot be an object of knowledge/ and ' the 
presented object of experience is not itself to be classed as an 
existent entity, though it has being in the sense that it is there' 
This no doubt correctly represents the theory and also the 
motives which underly it, but besides apparently reducing the 
objects of nature, as we apprehend them, to subjective pro- 
cesses in the mind of the percipient, it fails to deal with the 
unnaturalness of the hypothesis, of which I complained in the 
text. Normally any phenomenon or appearance expresses the 
nature of the existent whose appearance it is ; but, in the whole 
realm of the inorganic at any rate, it cannot be contended that 
there is anything to suggest the soul-centres which Pan- 
psychism places behind every natural occurrence. They seem 
to obscure the nature of the facts rather than to render them 
more intelligible. Hence the theory (I am constrained to re- 
peat) though capable of intellectual statement, seems to me 
in its universal application, to be without vital meaning and, 
in that sense, to lack credibility. 

As regards the point which I specially criticised, the at- 

419 



4 20 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

tempt to treat physical laws as consolidated habits, themselves 
the result of evolution, Mr. Richardson concedes much of what 
I contended for, when he admits that ' action is impossible 
without environment ' and that ' the monads must always have 
had some nature.' Hence he presents the theory in a distinctly 
limited form: * By the evolution of natural laws, the pluralist 
simply means that the laws of nature did not always exist in 
their present relatively fixed form.' I quite agree with him 
that ' laws are not, as it were, imposed upon things from with- 
out, but are merely descriptions of the way in which things 
behave.' But no such independent substantiation of laws was 
involved in my argument. What I sought to press home was 
that habits of action cannot be acquired except in the face of 
a definite system of conditions to which the creature reacts, and 
that the resulting response is determined by the joint nature 
of the interacting factors. But Mr. Peirce's theory appears to 
build upon a spontaneity which ignores ' natures ' altogether. 
(The italics in my quotations from Spiritual Pluralism are Mr. 
Richardson's own.) 



NOTE B (p. 190) 

A personal disclaimer on Professor Taylor's part and a 
more careful examination of parallel passages in Mr. Brad- 
ley's work have convinced me that the statements quoted are 
not intended in a strictly Berkeleian sense. They are prob- 
ably meant to emphasise the meaninglessness of a world 
entirely unrelated to sentience, which is substantially the argu- 
ment of my sixth lecture. But the form of expression is 
certainly misleading. 



NOTE C. IDEALISM AND MENTALISM 

It may not be amiss to remind the reader that the argument 
of Lecture X is to be taken in connection with the strong 
emphasis laid throughout the volume on the meaninglessness, 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 421 

the nonsensicality one might say, of a world from which feel- 
ing and appreciation should be absent, and in connection also 
with the recurring polemic against the idea of the thing-in- 
itself apart from knowledge. Just because the centrality of 
intelligence, as the sole principle of explanation and unity, had 
been so insistently dwelt upon throughout, and most recently 
in the summary of the argument in the preceding lecture, 
I have been perhaps less careful of my phraseology in this 
particular discussion than I ought to have been. Noth- 
ing could be further from my intention than to treat the 
material world as a set of self-existent facts, which just 
happen to be there, and which the conscious mind — another 
empirical fact — just stumbles upon in the course of its life- 
adventure. I do not hold the realistic creed as formulated 
by a recent disciple, that the universe is * a box containing 
many and different contents/ I am indebted, therefore, to 
Professor Bosanquet for calling my attention (in his review 
of my book in Mind) to a phrase which, taken by itself, might 
seem to re-introduce the unrelated dualism against which I 
had contended, by speaking of the existence of things ' entirely 
apart from their being known/ The phrase occurred in a 
context which dealt primarily with the knowledge of this or 
that individual, but I recognise its undesirability, and words 
are now substituted (on p. 192) which limit my meaning and 
make the reference to Berkeley's instance clear. I have also 
modified the phraseology of a sentence on p. 200. 

The general purpose of the Lecture, I may add, was to 
disentangle the philosophical doctrine of Idealism from the 
epistemological heresy of Subjective Idealism or Mentalism, 
and, further, to show that philosophical arguments based on 
cognition alone can yield us only a formal or abstract unity. 
These two issues are not quite the same, although Green's 
view of nature as a system of thought-relations formed a 
natural transition from the one to the other. Perhaps it 
might have conduced to greater clearness, had the epistemo- 
logical debate between Mentalism and Realism been more fully 
developed in terms of contemporary controversy and the criti- 
cism of Green reserved for another context, when more 



422 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

justice might have been done to the various aspects of his 
system. Historically Green's philosophy was an avowed 
polemic against Mentalism of the Berkeleian or Humian type. 
But his Kantian dualism between thought and sense and his 
hesitating treatment of sensation seem to lead him back to a 
species of subjectivism. 

In an article which I wrote in reply to certain criticisms 
(Mind, January 1919), the epistemological argument is a little 
more fully stated, and it may be useful to incorporate a few 
paragraphs here. They may help to clear up the sense in 
which the independence of the object is asserted and the 
grounds on which the assertion is made. Speaking of the 
Berkeley-Mill-Bain analysis of matter into forms of conscious 
process or actual and possible experience, which one of my 
critics appeared to accept, I said: There is nothing which I 
believe to be epistemologically more unsound than this iden- 
tification of the knower's knowledge or experience with the 
reality of the object he knows. Knowledge, experience, con- 
sciousness — all such terms — contain in their very essence a 
reference beyond the subjective process to a reality known or 
experienced in that process. They all point beyond them- 
selves to an object whose reality is not constituted by the 
knowing but presupposed by it, and in that sense independent 
of it. This is, I hold, the irreducible truth in Realism, and it 
will be found that the very language used by the Mentalists 
often betrays the confusion on which their position rests. 
When, for example, Dean Rashdall says * Matter, as we know 
it, can always be analysed away into a form of conscious ex- 
perience/ a critic might easily retort that the proposition is in 
effect an identical one, for ' matter, as we know it/ is taken 
in it as equivalent to ' our knowledge of matter \ Or, again, 
we are told, that if we think of matter in the sense of the 
Idealist, we must think of it as ' existing only in and for 
Mind \ But there is, or may be, a great difference between 
' in ' and ' for \ An object, when sensed or in any way experi- 
enced, may intelligibly be said to exist for the mind in ques- 
tion or to be present to it ; but it is contrary to philosophical 
and scientific analysis no less than to common sense to de- 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 423 

scribe the object as in the mind. Such a form of expression 
really depends upon the unfounded (and, let us hope, now ex- 
ploded) dogma that we cannot know a thing without actually 
being the thing, or unless the thing migrates over into us and 
becomes part of our own being. From this follows, in the 
first instance, the doctrine of Representative Perception, which 
in turn gives place to Subjective Idealism. But, if we refuse 
to yield to this unfounded prejudice at the outset, we shall not 
be tempted to sacrifice the reality of the object by reducing it 
to a process in the knowing mind. We shall be able to recog- 
nise that the reality of the fact known is everywhere the 
precondition of the fact of our knowing it and not vice versa. 
This is so obvious in our own case that the second word of 
the Mentalist is always the retractation of his first. He hastens 
to assure us that the identification of the object with the mental 
experience is of course not true in the case of any finite mind 
whose experiences come and go, have a beginning and an 
end. To make the theorem true we have to imagine the all- 
sustaining experience of a divine or cosmic consciousness. 
But if this transference of the issue appears at first sight to 
make the argument more plausible, that is only, as I have 
argued, because in our statement of the new case we have 
insensibly altered the conditions. Under one set of phrases 
or another, we attribute to such a cosmic consciousness a 
productive or creative activity which confers upon the objects 
of its thought just that stability and relative independence 
which we recognise in the object of our own knowledge, and in 
virtue of which these cosmic objects, as I may call them, are 
supposed to be capable of becoming common objects to any 
number of finite minds. But, even so, the theory immediately 
breaks down on closer examination ; for, if we give it the mean- 
ing which makes it persuasive, it implies, in the case of any so- 
called object, the identity, or at least the complete resemblance, 
of the divine and the human mode of experience. But how 
can we identify our own sense-experience of the external world 
with the mode in which Nature enters into a divine experience ? 
Hence the theory tends to change its form. ' The object and 
the sensation/ are no longer taken, in Berkeley's phrase, as ' the 



424 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

same thing ' ; the sense-experience of the finite consciousness 
is represented as the immediate result of the divine Will, 
and the reality and independence of the object is now placed 
in the permanent exciting cause of the experience. But 
with this acknowledgment of an extra-mental reality, we 
have abandoned the principle on which Mentalism stands. 
The weakness of the new version is, moreover, that the 
reference to bare Will does not explain the particularity — 
the nature — of the occurrences. But, seeing that what is willed 
is supposed to be consciously willed, the character of the events 
and what may be called the scheme of operations as a whole 
must be somehow present to the divine Mind ; and that raises 
once more the question of ' how \ When Berkeley grapples 
intermittently with this question in Siris, his reflections seem 
to be leading him to a view not far removed from Platonic 
Realism. 

It was accordingly the epistemological falsity, as it seemed to 
me, of the mentalistic argument in its original form and the 
ambiguity of all the attempts to re-state it in cosmic terms — 
as well as the exiguous nature of the result attainable by such 
a mode of reasoning, even if its validity were granted — that 
made me anxious to keep my own argument free from such 
entangling associations. But I did not on that account intend 
for a moment to assert the metaphysical self -existence, as I 
may term it, of material things. Modern Realists probably 
tend as a rule to do so, but the idea of the universe as a 
mere aggregate of independent existences, whether these exist- 
ences be minds or things, is to me ultimately unthinkable ; and, 
of course, the materialistic form of such an idea — as if the 
universe consisted of ' bits of unrelated stuff lying about ' — 
is the precise antithesis of everything I have ever taught. * Es- 
sential relatedness ' is the conception which I oppose to the 
figment of the unrelated (and therefore ultimately unknow- 
able) thing in itself, on which I have poured unmitigated 
scorn. Things exist as they are known by mind, and they may 
be said to exist in order to be so known and appreciated. In 
this sense all things exist for mind, but my point is that they do 
exist ; a thing is not itself ' a form of conscious experience/ a 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 425 

phase, that is to say, of the being of the experiencing mind. 
Finite minds require an environment by which they are shaped 
and from which they receive their content, and it is ultimately 
nonsensical to seek to represent the environment as a state or 
process of the mind itself. We do not dream of doing so in 
the case of the social environment; no form of Subjective 
Idealism has been consistent enough to ' analyse away ' other 
selves into forms of the conscious experience of the subject by 
whom they are known and whom they influence. Why, then, 
should we so treat that other environment of external nature, 
which presents itself so obviously to unsophisticated people 
as an independent reality with which they are in relation? 
My natural realism consists, first of all, in refusing to ob- 
literate this manifest distinctness in existence, as the Men- 
talistic argument constantly tends to do, and, secondly, in 
declining to follow the seductive example of the Pan-psychists 
who, while accepting a real independence or distinctness, trans- 
mute the apparently unconscious system of nature into a 
multitude of infinitesimally conscious centres. My difficulty 
with Pan-psychism is that if we are in earnest with the 
spiritual or psychic nature of the monads, we lose once more, 
as in Mentalism, the idea of environment, in the sense in which 
it seems to be involved in the existence of a finite spirit. In one 
sense, doubtless, it may be contended that Pan-psychism does 
provide an environment for the individual, to wit, the social 
environment constituted by all the other co-existing monads. 
But the social environment is, in our experience, based upon 
the natural. Spirits, for their individuation, self-expression 
and intercomunication, appear to require bodies and the system 
of nature in which these bodies are rooted ; and to resolve these 
bodies and the whole material world into little minds is the 
beginning of an infinite progress. These little minds in turn 
imply some medium in which they are shaped and through 
which they can act. 



426 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 



NOTE D. THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE 
INDIVIDUAL 

Lectures XIV and XV have been the subject of a good 
deal of discussion. The central question of these lectures 
has been denned in an apt phrase by Professor Bosanquet 
as ' the teleological status of finite spirits in the universe ', and 
as such it formed the subject of debate at one of the annual 
Symposia of the Aristotelian Society in July 1918. As actu- 
ally formulated for discussion, the question proposed took the 
somewhat technical, and, as it proved, not altogether unam- 
biguous form, ' Do finite individuals possess a substantive or 
an adjectival mode of being?', but the vital issue underlying 
this abstract formula was (again in Professor Bosanquet's 
words) the 'real contrast of tendency', 'the distinction be- 
tween two attitudes to life ', on which I had dwelt in Lec- 
tures XIV and XV. The Symposium consisted of papers by 
Professor Bosanquet, myself, Professor Stout and Viscount 
Haldane (in the order given) concluding with a Reply by 
Professor Bosanquet. The first four papers are included in 
the volume of the Society's Proceedings for 1917-18, and the 
whole Symposium has been republished separately in the 
volume Life and Individuality, edited for the Society by 
Professor Wildon Carr. 

I may be permitted here to transcribe a page or two from 
my own contribution as an extension or further enforcement 
of the argument in the Lectures. An illustration used by 
Professor Bosanquet in his introductory paper will best intro- 
duce my remarks. 

' A simple analogy from knowledge (he said) supports the 
conception that the perfection of the finite individual would 
imply a change in his identity, and possibly an absorption into 
another's. If my philosophy were made complete and self- 
consistent, I am sure my critics would admit, it could no 
longer be identified with that which I profess as mine; but 
would probably amalgamate with that of some one else, and 
in the end with that of all. I do not know why the same 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 427 

should not be the case with myself/ (Life and Finite Indi- 
viduality, p. 99.) 

The use of such an analogy could not but confirm my im- 
pression of the extent to which Professor Bosanquet's general 
theory depends on a too exclusive reference to the logical 
analysis of knowledge. But the logical analysis of knowledge 
(I wrote) 'yields us no more than the Kantian unity of 
apperception, which, as such, is no real self (whether hu- 
man or divine) but simply the ideal unity of systematised 
knowledge. Kant himself equates the subjective unity with the 
idea of Nature as a ' Natur-einheit ' or systematic unity. It is 
the idea of the unity of the universe as an intelligible system, 
an idea which Kant insists is a necessary idea, the necessary 
presupposition of any knowledge whatsoever. I am far from 
disparaging the importance of this conception in its proper 
reference in logic or epistemology ; but to treat the postulate 
of knowledge as itself a real being — the so-called universal con- 
sciousness — is in effect to hypostatise an abstraction. And 
if we restrict our attention to knowledge-content, there is no 
ground discernible for the distinction and multiplication of 
personalities. These are at best only different points of view — 
peepholes, so to speak — from which an identical content is 
contemplated. They are distinguishable, therefore, only by the 
greater range of content which they command and the greater 
coherence which they are consequently able to introduce 
into their world-scheme. The natural consummation of such 
limited points of view is to be pieced together and har- 
monised in the central or universal viewpoint from which, with 
all the facts before us, we should be able to see them all in 
their proper relations as a completely coherent system. The 
existence of finite centres at all is a superfluity for the theory, 
which accepts it (somewhat ungraciously) as a fact which 
cannot well be denied, but a distinction whose ' precarious and 
superficial nature ' it cannot sufficiently emphasise. 

My position, on the contrary, is that belief in the relative 
independence of human personalities and belief in the exist- 
ence of God as a living Being are bound up together. Thus 
I interpret the meaning of creation. The process of the finite 



428 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

world means the actual origination of new centres of life and 
agency, not created by a magical word of evocation, but given 
the opportunity to make themselves. Professor Bosanquet in 
his chapters on the ' Moulding of Souls ', describes this process 
suggestively as one of * eliciting our own souls from their out- 
sides ', but he admits later that ' elicit ', though a useful word, 
1 covers an almost miraculous creation which it does not 
explain '. The process is in truth not simply ' almost ' but 
wholly miraculous, if by that is meant that, in the nature of 
the case, we, who are its products, cannot understand the 
method of our own creation any more than we can fully 
reconcile to ourselves the separateness and moral independence 
of the status achieved with the relation of creaturely depend- 
ence which is involved from the beginning and persists to the 
end. But the process goes on daily before our eyes in every 
case of the growth of a mind, and my contention is that it is 
to be accepted, not as an unexplained and puzzling exception 
to an otherwise intelligible scheme of things, but as itself the 
illuminative fact in which the meaning of the whole finite 
process may be read. 

Professor Bosanquet says, ' I cannot believe that the supreme 
end of the Absolute is to give rise to beings such as I ex- 
perience myself to be \ But to put the case in that way is 
hardly to put it fairly. It is not I, ' such as I experience 
myself to be ', or, as he puts it in the previous page, the 
finite spirit * as it stands and experiences itself with all its im- 
perfections on its head ', which can be conceived as the end of 
the Absolute (and apparently the finished result of all its 
pains) ; it is the spirit as God knows it and intends it to be- 
come, the spirit with its infinite potentialities and aspirations 
and the consciousness of its own imperfections, which is the 
fulcrum of its advance and the guarantee of a nobler future. 
This is what Professor Bosanquet means by the ' intentional ' 
as opposed to the ' given ' unity of the self. Our unity, he 
says, is ' a puzzle and an unsatisfied aspiration ' — it is a ' de- 
mand ', a ' pretension ' which is never made good. And he 
takes the line of arguing that because the desire for immor- 
tality, so far as it is conceived in a religious spirit and deserves 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 429 

serious consideration, is not a desire for the perpetuation and 
stereotyping of my present self in all its poverty and mean- 
ness, but rather a desire to be fashioned more and more in the 
likeness of a perfect humanity, therefore it is not a desire 
for personal continuance at all, but, strictly speaking, he 
seems to say, inconsistent with it. It is identification with 
perfection which we seek, in the sense of merging our own 
personality altogether in that of the Perfect Being. As he 
puts it in his Gifford Lecture, it is not ' our ' personality but 
1 a ' personality, whose eternity the moral and religious con- 
sciousness demands, and so it is ' no puzzle ', he concludes, 
' no " faith as vague as all unsweet ",' to offer the eternal 
reality of the Absolute as that realisation of ourself which 
we instinctively demand and desire.' Surely this is to misread 
the situation. Because I desire to be made more and more 
in the likeness of God, I do not therefore desire to be God. 
The development of a personality in knowledge and goodness 
does not take place through confluence with other personalities, 
nor is its goal and cousummation to yield up its proper being 
and be ' blended with innumerable other selves ' in the Abso- 
lute. In spite of Professor Bosanquet's fresh attempts at 
justification, and in spite of the ecstatic utterances of the 
mystics, I maintain that the idea of blending or absorption 
depends entirely on material analogies which can have no ap- 
plication in the case of selves. ' I surrender my soul heartily 
to God,' wrote Labadie, the French Pietist, in his last will and 
testament, ' giving it back like a drop of water to its source, 
and rest confident in Him, praying God, my origin and ocean, 
that He will take me unto Himself and engulf me eternally 
in the divine abyss of His Being.' The physical metaphor 
dominates the whole conception. But absorption or * engulf- 
ment \ in the case of a spiritual being, means only the ex- 
tinction of one centre of intelligence and love, without any 
conceivable gain to other intelligences or to the content of the 
universe as a whole. Did Labadie suppose that he had not 
already his being in God, or that a union founded in knowl- 
edge and love and conscious service is not closer and more 
intimate by far than any which can be represented by the 



430 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

fusion of material things? Did he suppose that the engulf - 
ment of his private being could in any way enrich the fontal 
Life from which it sprang? Surely his value to God, or that 
of any other worshipping saint, must be held to lie in the per- 
sonality of the worshipper. The existence of an individual 
centre of knowledge and feeling is in itself an enrichment of 
the universe, and the clearer and intenser the flame of the in- 
dividual life, the greater proportionally the enrichment. To 
merge or blend such centres is simply to put out the lights 
one by one. In the society of such individuals, and in their 
communion with God, the supreme values of the universe 
emerge, and it is not personal vanity which suggests that for 
the Absolute such communion must possess a living value 
which no solitary perfection or contemplative felicity could 
yield. 



NOTE E. GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 

Various critics have referred to the fact that these two 
terms are apparently used in the Lectures interchangeably. 
The fullest criticism of my terminology in this respect occurs 
in the course of a very sympathetic article by Professor H. R. 
Mackintosh in the Contemporary Review for December 1917. 
He shows by a collation of passages that the two terms appear 
to be directly equated with one another, and he urges that 
such sheer identification is inconsistent with the ethical Theism 
with which my argument concludes. The apparent equation 
leads Professor Widgery, in the Indian Philosophical Review, 
No. 1, to attack my position as undiluted 'Absolutism \ Pro- 
fessor Bosanquet and Dean Rashdall have commented, from 
different points of view, on the same usage. It would perhaps 
be more correct to say that I frequently use the terms indif- 
ferently than that I expressly identify them. And in some of 
the passages, as when I speak, for example, of ' a principle of 
explanation which we name the Absolute or God ', or, again, 
of 'the conception of a rerum natura, whether we call it 






SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 431 

Nature, the Absolute, or God ', the ' or ' may fairly, I think, 
be taken as chronicling a variation in philosophical usage, 
which is unessential for the point under discussion, rather than 
as indicating a personal view of the precise equivalence of the 
terms. As a matter of fact, the two terms in question are 
plainly not precise equivalents in the sense that the one may 
be substituted for the other in any context ; and an examina- 
tion of the variations in my own usage would indicate, I 
believe, a growing differentiation between the two as the 
argument proceeds. This is partly due to the progressive 
nature of my argument which Professor Mackintosh rightly 
signalises, and on which I may be permitted for a moment 
to dwell. The whole of the first series of lectures was devoted 
to the establishment, as against Naturalism, of the general 
position of Idealism. The argument did not go beyond the 
world of finite experience: it was content to recognise in the 
process of that world an indwelling reason and purpose. ' God 
as immanent,' I said, in opening the second series, might be 
described as the next of the first year's lectures ; but, so far, 
the further issue between an impersonal Absolutism and 
a Theism which should be at once ethical and religious re- 
mained undetermined. All the more distinctively speculative 
questions as to the meaning of creation, the degree of inde- 
pendence compatible with a derived existence, the possibility 
and nature of a divine experience — these and other cognate 
questions all remained to be dealt with in the second series. 
Inadequate as must inevitably be the treatment of such prob- 
lems, the questions were at least faced and considered, and it 
seems to me on reflection that the sifting of the difficulties 
helped to clarify my own thought, making distinctions clearer 
and more explicit, and thus insensibly superseding phrases 
which bore an intelligible meaning in the earlier context in 
which they occurred. Something of this kind happened, I 
think, with the terms ' God ' and ' the Absolute ' when the fact 
of the divine transcendence became as obvious as the doctrine 
of immanence dwelt on in the earlier series. But, in spite of 
this differentiation, the two terms will undoubtedly be found 
used from time to time as interchangeable even to the end; 



432 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

and perhaps I may be able to show that the usage is defensible 
and need cause no real confusion of thought. 

Why, it may be asked, retain at all a term like the Absolute, 
apparently so ambiguous in its import and so questionable in 
its antecedents ? Dean Rashdall would prefer to dispense with 
it altogether and to speak simply of * the Universe ', which he 
would then describe as consisting of ' God and the finite 
centres \ There is an apparent simplification here which is 
attractive; but it is a simplification reached, it seems to me, 
by sacrificing the conception of immanence, and reverting to a 
purely deistic view of the relation of God to the spirits whom 
He is said to create. ' Universe ' is, moreover, too cold and 
threadbare a term to serve as the ultimate designation of the 
living Fact we seek to name. Etymologically, no doubt, it 
was intended to imply the unity and system of the whole, as 
opposed to what Carlyle called a multiverse or chaos. But 
the implication hardly survives in ordinary usage, and the 
term is perhaps most commonly used not as an all-inclusive 
term but of the world as distinguished from God, its primary 
suggestion being that of the immeasurable fields of space dotted 
with innumerable suns and planets. In any case, its associa- 
tions are with the ' bad ' infinite, the endless progress ; it lacks 
almost entirely the suggestion of a self-contained and inter- 
nally organised whole, beyond which there is nothing. The 
latter is the true philosophical meaning of the Absolute, and 
it is well to have a term to express just this meaning. For any 
idealist or spiritual view, reality is a systematic whole of this 
description. Such a theory as I have tried to expound finds it 
impossible to take God and the world as two separate and in- 
dependently existing facts. A deistically conceived God, exist- 
ing in solitary state before the world was, and to whom the 
finite world bears only a contingent relation is, I have insisted, 
a figment of the logical imagination. God exists only as a 
self-communicating Life: in theological language, creation is 
an eternal act or process — a process which must be ultimately 
understood not as the making of something out of nothing 
but as a self-revelation of the divine in and to finite spirits. 
Such, I said, is ' the eternal fashion of the cosmic life \ This, 






SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 433 

then, is the true Absolute, a term which would be inapplicable 
to the transcendent God of an abstract monotheism, but which 
is not unfitly applied to the sweep of a Life which realises 
itself in and through the process of the finite world, as con- 
summated in the divine sonship of man. It is always, I think, 
of God as thus organic to the world that the term ' the Abso- 
lute ' is used in my volume, and Professor Ward's hyphened 
phrase ' God-and-the-world ' would therefore exactly express 
the meaning I had intended to convey. 

It is plain that the process involves a real otherness in the 
finite selves and this is strongly emphasised in my argument. 
I have protested against the monism which treats the indi- 
vidual selves as merely the channels through which a single 
universal consciousness thinks and acts — masks, as it were, 
of the one actor who takes all the parts in the cosmic drama. 
And I have protested equally against the opposite idea, which 
denies any divine self-consciousness except that which is 
realised in the finite individuals. My argument presupposes 
at every turn a comprehensive divine experience which is other 
than, and infinitely more than, that of any finite self or of all 
finite selves collectively, if their several contributions could 
be somehow pieced together. If the first view abolishes the 
reality of the finite selves, the second recognises /them alone as 
real, reducing God to the status of an abstract universal. In 
opposition to these two extremes I maintain, as I have always 
maintained, the real individuality and ethical independence of 
the finite selves as the fundamental condition of the moral life ; 
and I accept at the same time the reality of a divine or perfect 
consciousness, because the process of human experience and 
the possibility of progress in goodness and truth remain to me 
inexplicable, unless the finite creature is grounded in and il- 
luminated by such a creative Spirit. The otherness which I 
recognise is, of course, most conspicuous when regarded from 
the side of will, but it must be admitted to hold good through 
the whole range of self-conscious experience. No mental ex- 
perience of mine can, in the sense in which it is my experience, 
form part of the experience of any other mind. Uniqueness 
belongs to the very notion of a self or consciousness. That 



434 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 

being so, it follows — follows, I might say, ex vi termini — that, 
as Dean Rashdall contends, it is meaningless to speak of one 
consciousness as ' included in another/ or to speak of ' a Mind 
which includes all minds ', and of man as, in that sense, * a part 
of God \ Even those who, like Mr. Bradley, speak exclusively 
of the Absolute, do not suggest that the experiences of the 
finite centres form part, as such, of the absolute experience, 
but only as, in some fashion, supplemented, transmuted, har- 
monised. 1 They could only form part, as such, of a divine or 
absolute consciousness, if that consciousness is identified and 
equated with the collectivity of the finite centres in which it 
is said to realise itself; and in that case there would be no 
divine or absolute experience at all in the sense of the present 
discussion. 

But while we recognise that the experiences of finite selves 
do not form part of the divine experience in the same sense 
in which they are the experiences of the selves in question, it 
is well to be on our guard against the implications of language 
which might lead us to say that ' all the conclusions which 
are applicable to each particular self in his relation to another 
seem to be equally applicable to the relation between God and 
any other spirit/ God means, for philosophy at all events, 
not simply or primarily the existence of another self-conscious 
Being, but rather the infinite values of which His life is the 
eternal fruition and which are freely offered to all spirits for 
their appropriation and enjoyment. Truth, Beauty, Goodness, 
Love — these constitute the being of God — * the fulness of the 
Godhead/ brokenly manifested in this world of time. God 
is Love. 2 * God Himself/ said St. Bernard, ' is manifested in 
His wisdom and His goodness, for God consists of these His 
attributes/ Both God and man in fact become bare points of 
mere existence — impossible abstractions — if we try to separate 

1 Cf. Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 413, 'otherwise than in their 
several immediacies'. 

2 Similarly in the later Neo-Platonic philosophy the supreme princi- 
ple is called the Good not in the sense that good is a predicate of it: 
Good is it. Cf. Professor Taylor's paper on " Proclus ", in the Pro- 
ceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. xviii, p. 613. 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES 435 

them from one another and from the structural elements of 
their common life. Hence, in speaking of God in His relation 
to the world, the expressions I use by preference are rather 
such as ' the containing life ' (p. 225), ' the sustaining and con- 
taining Life of all the worlds ' (p. 389), ' the ultimate Experi- 
ence on which we depend ' (p. 364). I speak of ' the creative 
and informing Spirit' (p. 363), 'the universal life ' in which 
the finite individuals share (p. 390), ' the nature of the whole ' 
on which they draw (p. 383), ' the fontal life of God ' (p. 294), 
and I describe that life — metaphorically, no doubt — in opposi- 
tion to Professor Bosanquet's analogy of a continuum, as c the 
focal unity of a world of self-conscious worlds to which it is 
not only their sustaining substance but the illumination of their 
lives ' (p. 297). Some of these expressions are doubtless open 
to criticism, and I do not put forward any of them as faultless, 
but what the phrases aim at is to keep in view at once the 
transcendent being of God for Himself, which we inadequately 
figure to ourselves as a self-consciousness or personality on the 
model of our own, and the creative and illuminative activity 
of the same Spirit in the beings which live, and are sustained 
in life, only through its self -communicating presence. 



INDEX 



Absolute, the, 155-7, 174, .407-17; 
the Absolute and the finite indi- 
vidual, Lectures XII, XIV, XV 
passim; the Absolute as the un- 
related, 304; purpose and ac- 
tivity in the Absolute, 338-41 ', 
the Absolute and the time-proc- 
ess, 360-5 ; Dr. Rashdall's dis- 
tinction between the Absolute 
and God, 387-91 ; Dr. McTag- 
gart's Absolute, 391-3. William 
James's conception of the Abso- 
lute, 397-9- 

Absolutism, 225, 242, 262, 291, 341, 
401, 414. 

Actual and the real, 243-55. 

Adamson, Robert, 52, 301 n. 

Agnosticism, 7, 51, 58-9, 1 18-19, 

158-75, 214-15. 

Animal mind, 100-3. 

Appearance and reality, 131-2, 136, 
158-63, 175, 216-19. 

Appearance and mere appearance, 
277. 

Aristotle, interpretation of de- 
velopment through the idea of 
End, 106, 154, 332; conception of 
the divine activity as the eternal 
thinking upon thought, 113, 304, 
346, 408-9; the individual as the 
concrete universal, 266, 272; the 
common sensibles, 127 n. ; the 
First Mover, 251, 319; matter 
and form, 305-6; casualty or 
accident, 416. 

Arnold, Matthew, 26, 268, 291. 

Athanasius, 410 n. 

Augustine, St., 295, 303-4, 365. 

Aurelius, Marcus, 40. 

Authority and reason, 62-3. 

Automatism, see Epiphenomenal- 
ism. 

Bacon, 6, 152, 246. 
Bain, A., 91, 284. 
Balfour, A. J., 41, 58-64, 199, 

379- 
Beauty and sublimity, 127-9. 
Belief, see Faith. 



Benevolence, Hume and Mill on 
divine, 403, 406. 

Bergson, 48, 69, 85, 155, 259, 342, 
Lecture XIX passim; on Plato 
and Aristotle, 346, on duree 
reelle, 352. 

Berkeley, 51, 228, 309, 392; his 
world of internal experience, 
1 16-18, 183, 201-2; his satirical 
handling of agnosticism, 161 ; 
circular nature of his mentalistic 
argument, 190-3. 

Biology, Lecture IV passim, 107-8, 
209. 

Blake, 144. 

Body and Mind, 99, 124-6. 

Bois-Reymond, Du, 92 n., 104-5. 

Bosanquet, B., 30, 191 n., 2,72,, 4*3 ; 
on body and mind, 99; on the 
secondary and ' tertiary ' quali- 
ties, 122, 127; on statistical re- 
sults, 186-8; on the criterion of 
value, 225-42; on the cosmo- 
logical argument, 251; on the 
Absolute and the finite indi- 
vidual, Lectures XIV, XV; use 
of the social analogy, 296-7; on 
the function of the material 
world, 308 ; on the temporal and 
the eternal, 343, 355, 368 ; on ' the 
chapter of accidents ', 416-17. 

Bradley, F. H., 190 n., 203, 215-16, 
256, 301, 342, 390 n., 399; on 
degrees of reality, 220-2; on the 
criterion of value, 225-42, 334; 
on the religious consciousness, 
252. 

Bridges, J. H., 150. 

Browning, 27, 44, 95, 114, 142, 244, 
260. 

Brunetiere, 64. 

Bruno, 105. 

Butler, Bishop, 63. 

Caird, E., 136, 146, 149-50, 199 n., 

245, 250, 334, 409. 
Carlyle, 156, 158. 
Carr, Professor Wildon, 351-3, 

384-5. 



438 



INDEX 



Casualty, involved in the existence 
of the finite, 415-16. 

Categories, right of each science to 
use its own, 72, 79, 94, 107-8, 
209; philosophy as criticism of 
categories, 108. 

Cause — a ' first ' cause, 301 ; cause 
as ground or reason, 302; ef- 
ficient causation inapplicable to 
the relation between spirits, 315- 
16. 

Chalmers, Thomas, 327 n. 

Chance, Mr. Peirce's derivation of 
laws from pure chance, 185. 

Christianity, 144, 157, 291, 30679, 
314-15, 409-17- 

Clifford, W. K, 181-2. 

Cognition, misleading implication 
of the term, 113-14- 

Coleridge, 106, 128, 314. 

Comte, 70, Lecture VII passim, 
153, 157-8, 213-14,. 238. 

Conation, involved in satisfaction, 
336-8 ; conative structure of con- 
sciousness, 356-7. 

Confluence of selves, 262 ff. 

Contingence and freedom, in 
James and Bergson, 374. 

Continuity and the emergence of 
real differences, 90-104. 

Copernicus, 28, 82. 

Cosmological argument, 249-51. 

Creation, 285, 288, Lecture XVI 
passim, 415. 

' Creative synthesis ', 95. 

Creative evolution, 155, 366, 370-4, 
380-3. 

Criterion of value, Lecture XII. 

Dante, 40-1, 104 n. 

Darwin, 66, 81-4, 328. 

Degrees of truth and reality, 222-3. 

Deism, 34-6, 46, 207, 298, 312. 

Design, the argument from, 70 n., 

76 n. ; Hume's discussion, 9-16; 

as affected by the theory of 

natural selection, 322-8. 
Descartes, 49, in, 115, 302, 393 n. ; 

on the idea of a Perfect Being, 

246-8._ 
Determinism, the illusion of, 367- 

70, 375- 
Development, philosophical mean- 
ing and implications of, 105-7, 

153-6. 
Dewey, Professor J., 112. 



Driesch, H., 69, 72, 74 n., 77-80. 

Dualism, between ' the heart ' and 
the reason, 47, 65; Cartesian 
dualism, 115; between ethical 
man and nature, 83, 132-3; in 
Greek thought, 305-6. 

Duration and succession, 349-54. 

Eckhart, 314 n. 

Elan vital, completely indetermi- 
nate, 378-9. 

Eliot, George, 406-7. 

Elliot, Hugh S. R., 164 n. 

Emerson, 292 n., 373. 

End, as the ultimate category of 
philosophical explanation, 29, 
106, 154-5, 331-2, 340. 

Energy, supposed results of the 
degradation of, 300. 

Environment, significance of the 
term, 83. 

Epigenesis, 95. 

Epiphenomenalism, 114 n., 356. 

Erdmann, J. E., 409. 

Erigena, Scotus, 314. 

Essence and appearance, 160-6. 

Eternal, Eternity, Lectures XVIII, 
XIX passim. 

Eucken, R., 242. 

Evil, 400 ff. 

Evolution, of sense-organs, 126-7. 
Cf. Development. 

Experience, relation of philosophy 
to, 66-7 ; learning by experience 
characteristic of the living being, 
85; planes of experience, 97, 
100-2, 154-5. 

Explanation, scientific, 91 ; philo- 
sophical, 106, 154, 331. 

External world, its instrumental or 
mediating function, 178, 200, 295, 
308. 

Faith, definition of, 82; distin- 
guished from Knowledge, 49, 55, 
239-42. 

Ferrier, J. E, 193-5, 199- 

Fichte, 29, 38, 219, 3 10- 1 1, 378. 

Flint, Robert, 299-302, 399. 

Fouillee, A., 130-1. 

Fraser, A. Campbell, 240, 291 n., 

315. 
Freedom, a postulate and a fact, 
31-2, 287-8, 291-3; Monadism 
and freedom, 183-7 ; M. Bergson 



INDEX 



439 



on freedom and contingency, 
370-9. 

Galileo, 49. 

Gassendi, 49. 

Geddes, Professor Patrick, 83, 
108 n. 

God as immanent, 37, 175-7, 215- 
22 ; as transcendent, the source 
of ideals, 243-55; a finite God, 
see Hume, Mill, James. 

Goethe, 246, 411, 413 n. 

Gray, Professor Asa, 328 n. 

Green, T. H., 155; the formal 
nature of his spiritual principle, 
195-9, 347; his dissolution of 
Nature into thought-relations, 
202-3. 

Haeckel, E., 84, 181, 328. 

Haldane, Dr. J. S., 70, 73-5, 76 n. 

Haldane, Lord, 217-18. 

Hamilton, Sir William, 7, 43, 51, 
124-6, 161-5, 214. 

Harrison, Frederic, 138, 168-70. 

Hartmann, E. von, 27 n., 53 n., 124, 
173, 298 n. 

Hegel, 38, 67, 131 n., 177, 218, 256, 
296, 304, 334, 339, 362, 415; on 
the truth as the whole, 154, 331 ; 
on the logic of religion, 250-1 ; 
the Hegelian Trinity and the de- 
duction of the many from the 
one, 309-13 ; the Absolute and 
the illusion of the finite, 340, 
412-13. 

Heraclitus, 342, 385. 

Hobbes, 49. 

Hodgson, Shadworth, 114 n. 

Hoffding, 39, 144, 207, 214. 

Hogg, Professor A. G., 200 n. 

Howison, Professor G. H., 316-21, 
386, 412 n. 

Hume, Lecture I passim, 25, 34, 46, 
103, 187-8, 201-2, 207, 294, 322; 
on a finite deity, 19, 401-2; a 
cause must be judged by its 
known effects, 18, 176, 244-5, 
249 ; unity and relatedness as fic- 
tions of the imagination, 196; 
Mr. Balfour's scepticism com- 
pared with Hume's, 60; Hume's 
purely hedonistic ideal, 406. 

Humanity, Religion of, 137-58. 

Humanism, 238. 

Huxley, T. H., 12, no n., 328; on 



Hume's theism, 16, 22; on the 
breach between the ethical and 
the cosmic process, 26, 83, 132-3 ; 
his conscious automatism, 51 ; 
his Berkeleian sensationalism, 
81. 

Ideal and the actual, Lecture XIII 
passim; the ideal and the real, 
53, 251-2. 

Idealism v. Naturalism, 38-42, 181, 
236; speculative idealism, 38, 56, 
57, 409; subjective idealism, see 
Mentalism. 

Imagination, the truth of the 
poetic, 127. 

Immanence, 37, 175-7, 215-16; 
Spinoza's doctrine of imma- 
nence, 221 ; immanence and 
transcendence, 253-5. 

Immortality, 43-5, 269-71. 

Incarnation, the Christian doc- 
trine of the, 144, 157, 307i 
409-10. 

Indiscernibles, identity of, 267. 

Individual, the finite, Lectures 
XIV, XV passim. 

Infinite, its active presence in the 
finite, 247, 251, 254. 

James, William, 41, 117, 144, 196, 
242, 268, 412, 413, 414; on a 
finite God, 19, 382, 393-4 ; on the 
specious present, 352-3; on de- 
terminism, 367-8; on an un- 
finished world and contingency, 
3&>, 373-4, 377 n. ; on pluralism, 
393-9; on meliorism, 382, 394. 

Janet, Paul, 310, 325-6. 

Jennings, H. S., 74. 

Judgements of value, objectivity 
of, 41, 241-2 ; not to be taken as 
detached intuitions, 223. 

Kant, 4, 8, 21 n., Lecture II passim, 
48-51, 69, 81, in, 147, 176, 198, 
207, 240, 254, 301, 371 ; on intrin- 
sic value, 27-30 ; on the nature of 
the organism, 70 n., 77 n. ; his 
phenomenalism, 1 18-19, 131-3, 
135, 153, 158-60, 163-4; on the 
argument from design, 322, 324- 
5, 328-30. 

Kapila, 200 n. 

Keats, 29, 127, 129, 256, 278. 

Kelvin, Lord, 97, 300. 



440 



INDEX 



Kidd, Benjamin, 63-4. 
Kipling, R., 142. 
Kropotkin, 84 n. 

Ladd, Professor G. T., 42 n. 

Lange, F. A., 51-4, 81, 149. 

Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 163. 

Laurie, S. S., 122-4, 127 n., 174, 
177, 215. 

Leibnitz, 54, 179-81, 188, 237-8, 295, 
386. 

Le Roy, 379-8o. 

Lessing, 29. 

Levy-Bruhl, 151 n. 

Life, question of origin of, 94-7. 
See Biology. 

Lindsay, A. D., 49 n. 

Locke, 6, 49, no, 112, 125 n., 183, 
196, 237, 248, 272, 347, 403 n. ; on 
the distinction betwixt man and 
brutes, 100-1 ; on knowledge 
and reality, 1 16-18, 158-60; on 
the existence of God, 249 ; on the 
consciousness of duration, 349- 
50, 354. 

Loeb, J., 73. 

Lotze, 108, 113, 174, 177, 282-3; on 
naturalism and idealism, 42, 54- 
6, 58; on the creation of finite 
selves, 99, 287 ; on the secondary 
qualities, 120-1 ; on the timeless- 
ness of truth, 345; on present, 
past, and future, 376. 

Lucretius, 105, 259. 

McGilvary, Professor E. B., 353 n., 

363-5. 

Mackenzie, Professor J. S., 343. 

McTaggart, J. M. E., 6 n., 19, 257, 
321, 343 n., 387, 391-3. 

Malthus, 83. 

Mansel, 7. 

Marett, R. R., 391 n. 

Marlowe, 243. 

Martineau, 36-7, 53- 254, 257-8, 311. 

Materialism, 40-1, 51, 81-2, 89, 105. 
See Naturalism. 

Maxwell, Clerk, 78. 

Mazzini, 142. 

Mechanism v. purpose, Lotze on, 
54 ; Kant on, 70 n., 76, 77 n. ; 
mechanistic explanation in bi- 
ology, 70-7. 

Meliorism, 382, 394-6. 

Mentalism, 190-204. 



Metaphysics, Comte's idea of, 135- 
6 ; agnostic travesty of, 163-4. 

Mill, J. S., 19, 94-5, 134 ; on design 
and a limited God, 324-5, 401-3, 
405-6. 

Mind-stuff, 182. 

Mind and Body, 99, 124-6. 

Moberly, W. H., 338. 

Monadism, 179-89, 203-4. 

Monism, see Absolutism. 

Monism (popular scientific), 181. 

Moore, Professor A. W., 238 n. 

Morality and the idea of intrinsic 
value, 26-8; Kant's treatment of 
the postulates of morality, 31-5 ; 
nature and morality, 26, 83-5, 
132, 146-9; religion and morality, 
difference of attitude, 394-6. 

Morgan, Professor Lloyd, 92, 98-9. 

Mozley, J. B., 268 n. 

Myers, F. W. H., 42 n. 

Naturalism and idealism con- 
trasted, 39-42; the naturalistic 
controversy during the nine- 
teenth century, Lecture III pas- 
sim; the true answer to natural- 
ism, 65 ; ambiguity of the term, 
88; the lower and the higher 
naturalism, Lecture V passim, 
209-10. 

Natural Realism, in Reid and 
Hamilton, 124-6. 

Natural Selection, 81-2, 84; and 
purpose, 327-8. 

Nature and morality, 26, 83-5, 132, 
146-9, 212-13 ; nature as a realm 
of law, 178, 187-8; the instru- 
mental or mediating function of 
nature, 200-1, 308; nature and 
the absolute, 202. 

Neo-Kantianism, in Lange, 51-3. 

Neo-Realism, 112, 191. 

Neo-Vitalism, 71-6; defective 
statements criticised, 77-80. 

Newton, 49, 153, 238, 405. 

Nietzsche, 30, 84, 88, 175, 268, 414. 

Non-contradiction, as the criterion 
of value, 227. 

Noumenon, the quest of the mythi- 
cal, 160-4. 

Numerical identity, 266-7. 

Omnipotence, conception of, 400-5, 
412, 417. 



INDEX 



441 



Ontological argument, Hume's 
treatment of, 8-9; Kant's criti- 
cisms, 8, 240; true meaning of, 
240-1. 

Orders or levels of existence, 92- 
108. 

Organic relations of nature and 
mind, 122-7, 146-9, 178-9, 210-13. 

Organism, action of, not describ- 
able in terms of mechanism, 72- 
7- 

Ongen, 304, 307-8. 

Ostwald, 108 n. 

Overstreet, Professor H. A., 238 n. 

Paley, 12. 

Pan-psychism, 178-89. 

Pantheism, the lower, 219, 253. 

Parmenides, 6 n., 173, 342, 381. 

Pascal, 47, 137. 

Pathetic fallacy, 128 n. 

Pearson, Karl, 72 n., 84, 92 n. 

Peirce, C. S., 184-7. 

Perry, Professor R. B., 223-4. 

Personality, as a formed will, 291 ; 
place of, in Greek and in Chris- 
tian thought, 291, 307. 

Personal Idealism, 225. 

Pessimism, 17-18, 27, 147. 

Phenomenon and noumenon, loo- 
s' 

Philo, 313. 

Philosophy, as criticism of cate- 
gories, 67, 108; the relation of 
philosophy to experience, 67. 

Picton, J. Allanson, 173. 

Planes of experience, 92-108. 

Plato, 236, 239, 259, 333, 342, 400, 
415; on creation, 305-6, 308-9; 
on the Good, 55, 181, 378; on 
time and the timeless, 154, 
303 n., 345-6, 360, 365. 

Pleasure or happiness not the end 
of the universe, 27, 403, 406-7, 
411. 

Plotinus, 313- 

Pluralism, Professor Ward on, 
95, 183-4; Professor Howison's, 
315-21, 386; William James's, 
393-8. 

Pope, 220, 253. 

Positivism, see Comte and Hu- 
manity, Religion of. 

Potentiality, the meaning of, 105-7. 

Pragmatism, 22, 112, 225, 238. 

Present, the specious, 352-3; the 



living present, 369-70; the mere 
present, 376. 

Prichard, H. A., 112. 

Proclus, 313. 

Progress, predicable of parts, not 
of the universe as a whole, 383. 

Purpose, characteristics of finite 
purpose, 323-4; Professor Bo- 
sanquet on teleology and pur- 
pose, 323, 335-8; the idea passes 
into that of a systematic and in- 
telligible whole, 328-31 ; purpose 
and the idea of satisfaction or 
value, 332-5; Spinoza on pur- 
pose, 332-3, 339- 

Rashdall, Dean, distinction be- 
tween God and the Absolute, 
387-91, 392 n., 407 n. 

Realism, Professor Laurie's state- 
ment of philosophical, 122-4. 
See also Natural Realism, Neo- 
Realism. 

Reason, attacks on, 62-3 ; reason 
and association distinguished, 
100-3. 

Reflex action, 73-4. 

Reid, Thomas, 124, 191, 349-51. 

Reinke's theory of ' dominants ', 
77, 80 n. 

Relatedness distinguished from 
Relativity, 116, 123, 126, 164, 211- 
12. 

Relevancy of response, 186-7. 

Religion and the religious con- 
sciousness, 137, 237-8, 252, 259, 
289-91. 

Renan, E., 89 n. 

Renouvier, C., 374. 

Representationism, 1 16-18, 201. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 243 n. 

Ritschl, A., 56-8. 

Rossetti, D. G., 87, 350. 

Royce, J., 279, 342, 354"5, 364 n., 
417. 

Satisfaction and value, 30; the 
argument from ' needs ' to their 
satisfaction, 61 ; Mr. Bradley's 
claim that ' our main wants must 
all find satisfaction', 233-5; sat- 
isfaction inseparable from cona- 
tion, 332-40; not to be identified 
-with pleasure, or even with hap- 
piness, 407. 

Scepticism, as a basis of faith, 7; 



442 



INDEX 



Mr. Balfour's scepticism com- 
pared with Hume's, 60. 

Schafer, Sir Edward, 96 n. 

Schiller, 52, 296. 

Schiller, F. C. S., 225. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 129 n. 

Secondary qualities, in Locke and 
Berkeley, 117; their objectivity, 
120-4. 

Seeley, Sir John, 144. 

Self, false notions of the, 257 ; Dr. 
McTaggart's view of selves as 
substances existing in their own 
right, 391 ; Professor Bosanquet 
on the ' formal distinctness ' and 
the possible blending or merging 
of selves, 261-4, on the ' re-dis- 
tribution ' of finite selves in the 
Absolute, 281-2; Mr. Bradley's 
metaphors in the same refer- 
ence, 280-1 ; selves share a com- 
mon content, but are unique 
wholes of content, 263, 266-8; 
'adjectival' theory of the self, 
271-4; not a complex group of 
universals, 283; the origin of 
finite centres, 285-8, 293; testi- 
mony of the religious conscious- 
ness to the relative independence 
or ' otherness ' of the selves, 
289-90. 

Self-sacrifice, 294, 410-12. 

Shakespeare, 142, 167, 362, 372 ; the 
world of Shakespeare's trage- 
dies, 223-4. 

Shekinah, man the true, 157. 

Shelley, 269. 

Sidgwick, Henry, 39, 191. 

Simpson, Professor J. Y., 104. 

Smith, Sir George Adam, 43-4. 

Society ('the social whole') and 
the individual, 258, 265-6, 
296-7. 

Soul-making, 29, 256, 260, 278. 

Space and time as principia indi- 
viduationis, 267, 364-5. 

Span of consciousness, 352-3. 

Spencer, Herbert, 30, 84, 99; on 
life, 94, 99; on the nature of ex- 
planation, 92-3 ; agnosticism and 
the unknowable, 7, 51, 58-9, 164- 
76, 214. 

Spinoza, 6 n., 34, 49, 173, 256, 272, 
291, 339; on cause as reason, 
301-2; on degrees of perfection, 
221-2; the relation of the world 



to God, 304, 314 ; the intellectual 
love of God, 291, 332-3. 

Statistical results, Professor Ward 
and Professor Bosanquet on, 
186-7. 

Stephen, Sir James F., 168-9. 

Stevenson, R. L., 268. 

Stirling, J. H., 44-5, 96, 118, 121, 
163. 

Stout, Professor G. F., 270, 273 n., 
277 n. 

Streeter, Rev. B. H., 409-10 n. 

Struggle for existence, over-em- 
phasized, 83-4. 

Substance, the Aristotelian and 
the Spinozistic sense of, 272, 
281 ; substance and qualities, 
162. 

Survival of the fittest, in Hume, 
13. 

Swinburne, 140 n., 238. 

Taylor, Professor A. E., 190 n., 
270, 355 n-, 360. 

Teleology, Lecture XVII passim, 
358-60. 

Tennyson, 35, 40, 44, 47, HI, 150, 
293 n., 294, 348-9, 363-4, 412. 

Theism, defined by Professor 
Flint, 399; Hume's theism, 14-16, 
20-3; Kant's theistic postulate, 
34-7 ; differentia between a theis- 
tic and a non-theistic doctrine, 
340; idea of God in traditional 
theism, 302-4, 340, 399, 408-9. 

Thomson, Professor J. Arthur, 
72 n., 77 n., 84, 108 n. 

Time, mathematical, as mere suc- 
cession, 349; primitive con- 
sciousness of duration, 350-3; 
time transcended in teleological 
explanation and in an artistic 
whole, 358-62; transcended, yet 
retained, in the Absolute, 363 ; 
time as principium individua- 
tionis, 267, 364-5; spatialized 
time and the illusion of deter- 
minism, 367-70. 

Timelessness of truths^ 344-7. 

Transcendence and immanence, 

253-5- 
Transition from one order of facts 

to another, 94-108, 209-10. 
Trendelenburg, A., 331. 
Trinity, the doctrine of the, 313, 

410. 



INDEX 



443 



Truth as the whole, 97, 106-7, 109, 

154-6, 177, 215, 331-2, 362. 
Tylor, Sir E. B., 298. 
Tyndall, John, 105. 

Ulrici, 304-5, 3io. 

Ultra-rational, appeal to the, 64. 

Uniqueness of the individual, 
267-9. 

Universal Consciousness (or the 
All-knower), 192-200, 397-8. 

Unknowable, the, 58, 164-8; Mr. 
Frederic Harrison on the Un- 
knowable, 169. 

Unpredictability of the future, 
370-5. 

Vaihinger, H., 53. 
Validity of truths, 345-7- 
Value, idea of intrinsic, 27-30; 
judgments of value, 40-1, 56-7, 



223; cognition and value, 113- 
14; criterion of value, Lecture 
XII passim; satisfaction, cona- 
tion, and value, 332-8. 
Vitalism, 70. See also Neo-Vi- 
talism. 

Wallace, W., 89-90, 103, 104 n. 

Ward, Professor James, 95 n., 103, 
183-8, 387-8. 

Will, as the complement of intelli- 
gence, 339; the spiritual will as 
the concrete personality, 291. 

Windelband, W., 39, 291 n., 306. 

Wordsworth, 25, 128-9, 204, 251, 
254, 268, 295. 

World organic to God, 295, 304-5, 
309-10, 315-16, 412, 414. 

Worth, see Value. 

Zeno, the paradoxes of, 367. 



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